The world as we know it, all the facts you could possibly want
by mikehughes2006
Summary: So, you've sat down at your computer screen, wanting to know facts, but not just any fact, EVERY fact. Well, this completely defeats the purpose of the website being called " read on!
1. Prologue

**The world as we know it, all the facts you could possibly want.**

 **PewDiePie facts.**

 **Felix Arvid Ulf Kjellberg, better known by his online alias PewDiePie, is a Swedish web-based comedian and producer, best known for his Let's Play commentaries and vlogs on YouTube.**

 **Born in Gothenburg, Sweden, PewDiePie originally pursued a degree in Industrial Economics and Technology Management at Chalmers University of Technology. In 2010, during his time at the university, he registered his PewDiePie YouTube account. The following year he dropped out of Chalmers to focus on his YouTube channel, much to the chagrin of his parents. Having been refused support from them, PewDiePie began working at a hot dog stand to fund his videos. PewDiePie soon gathered a rapidly increasing online following, and in 2012, his channel surpassed one million subscribers.**

 **Since 15 August 2013, PewDiePie's channel has been the most subscribed channel on YouTube, being surpassed briefly in November and December 2013 by YouTube's Spotlight channel. Holding the position since 22 December 2013, the channel has reached over 40 million subscribers, as of November 2015. On 19 July 2014, the channel surpassed RihannaVEVO to become the most viewed channel of all time, and as of November 2015, the channel has received over 10 billion video views. His father, Ulf, is also a Chief Executive of a company. On this decision, PewDiePie has stated, "Thinking about it now, it was utterly absurd. To get into Chalmers for industrial economics you need straight A's, but somehow I was happier selling hot dogs and making my own gaming-videos."**

 **YouTube career**

 **Channel format**

 **The main focus of PewDiePie's videos is his commentary and reactions to various games as he plays through them. Unlike conventional walkthroughs, his Let's Play videos are devoted to "sharing gaming moments on YouTube with my bros." most notably Amnesia: The Dark Descent and its related mods. PewDiePie also began posting weekly vlogs starting from 2 September 2011. He typically performs a "Brofist" at the end of each of his videos. In 2014, the gamer began to more actively play games that interested him, regardless if they were of the horror genre or not. In addition, he is also known to support video games from indie developers.**

 **History**

 **Early years**

 **PewDiePie originally registered a YouTube account under the name "Pewdie"; After forgetting the password to this account, he then registered the "PewDiePie" YouTube channel on 29 April 2010. On 11 July 2012 the channel reached 1 million subscribers, In October 2012, OpenSlate ranked the PewDiePie channel as the #1 YouTube channel. That December, PewDiePie signed with Maker Studios. In May, at the inaugural Starcount Social Stars Awards in Singapore PewDiePie won the award for Swedish Social Star. Competing against Jenna Marbles, Smosh and Toby Turner, PewDiePie also won the award for Most Popular Social Show. In July 2013, he overtook Jenna Marbles to become the second most subscribed YouTube user, and reached 10 million subscribers. On becoming the most subscribed YouTube user, PewDiePie commented, "When I started my YouTube channel in 2010, I never imagined that one day it would be the most subscribed channel in the world and that I would be a part of such a great community." After becoming the most subscribed user, Ben Donovan of Maker Studios stated that PewDiePie "is a great example of how a YouTube content creator can amass a worldwide following due to passion and creativity, and his large subscriber base showcases the loyalty and strong connection he has to his 'bros.'" On 1 November, PewDiePie became the first channel to reach 15 million subscribers, although the following day, the channel was surpassed by YouTube's Spotlight account at the top of the site's subscriber rankings. In the same month, PewDiePie proclaimed his dislike of YouTube's new comment system. In December, PewDiePie overtook the YouTube Spotlight channel to once again become the most subscribed user on YouTube.**

 **Throughout 2012 and 2013, PewDiePie's channel was one of the fastest growing on YouTube, in terms of subscribers gained. In 2013, the PewDiePie channel went from 3.5 million to just under 19 million subscribers, and by the end of 2013 it was gaining a new subscriber every 1.037 seconds. Billboard reported that the PewDiePie channel gained more subscribers than any other channel in 2013. Additionally, in the second half of 2013, the PewDiePie channel earned just under 1.3 billion video views.**

 **Continued growth**

 **In March 2014, PewDiePie updated his video production, announcing he would be scaling down the frequency of uploads. Later in the month, PewDiePie uploaded a video, announcing he would permanently disable comments on his YouTube videos. On his decision, PewDiePie stated "I go to the comments and it's mainly spam, it's people self advertising, it's people trying to provoke... just all this stuff that to me, it doesn't mean anything. I don't care about it, I don't want to see it." After disabling comments, PewDiePie continued interacting with his audience through Twitter and Reddit. In mid-September, PewDiePie uploaded a follow-up video, sticking by his decision, and announcing the launch of , an online forum, in which he will actively connect with his viewers, designed to replace the YouTube comment section.**

 **In September, PewDiePie began streaming videos of his co-hosted series, BroKen, onto . Kjellberg co-hosts the series with Kenneth Morrison, better known as CinnamonToastKen, also an online game commentator. On 13 October, PewDiePie decided to allow comments on his videos once more, albeit only after approval. However, PewDiePie has tweeted, "I have them set as approved so I can redirect people to comment on my website instead." In a later video, PewDiePie claimed that disabling comments helped him become happier. In 2014 alone, PewDiePie's account amassed nearly 14 million new subscribers and over 4.1 billion video views; both figures were higher than any other user.**

 **During July 2015, PewDiePie's videos were documented to receive over 300 million views per month. On 6 September 2015, PewDiePie's YouTube account became the first to eclipse 10 billion video views.**

 **In September, PewDiePie hinted that he would have a role in series, and that he was on location in Los Angeles for the show's shooting. Although not many details were revealed at the time, in October, it was announced that the series would be titled Scare PewDiePie. The series is set to be released in 2016 through YouTube's paid subscription service, YouTube Red. At the Social Star Awards, PewDiePie greeted his fans personally despite security warning him against doing so. Early in his YouTube career, Kjellberg used rape jokes in his videos. Criticisms of the use of these jokes stirred controversy, and on 25 October 2012, Kjellberg posted a Tumblr message, stating "I just wanted to make clear that I'm no longer making rape jokes, as I mentioned before I'm not looking to hurt anyone and I apologise if it ever did." The Globe and Mail stated "unlike many young gamers, he listened when fans and critics alike pointed out their harmful nature, and resolved to stop making rape jokes."**

 **Rob Walker of Yahoo! called PewDiePie's popularity "insane." Walker, among other reporters and some casual gamers, have questioned the gamer's popularity, with others criticising it. Walker noted PewDiePie's interaction with his audience, writing, "While he can be raucous and crude, it always comes across as genuine. He constantly addresses his audience as a bunch of peer-like friends, as opposed to distant, genuflecting fans. He's certainly more than willing to make fun of himself in the process." On if he has a responsibility to his audience, PewDiePie has claimed that, in a way, he does, stating, "many people see me as a friend they can chill with for 15 minutes a day," and adding, "The loneliness in front of the computer screens brings us together. But I never set out to be a role model; I just want to invite them to come over to my place."**

 **According to a 2014 survey commissioned by Variety, PewDiePie, along with a few other YouTube personalities, has been reported to be more influential and popular than mainstream celebrities, such as Jennifer Lawrence, among U.S. teenagers aged 13 through 18. His channel also appeals strongly to younger viewers, a group Google refers to as Generation C for their habits of "creation, curation, connection and community". Chris Reed of The Wall St. Cheat Sheet commented on the divisive opinion on PewDiePie, stating, "The great divide in opinion on PewDiePie seems to be largely generational. Older people are less likely to subscribe to YouTube channels, or to pay much credence to YouTube personalities in general. Many younger viewers, on the other hand, see him as endlessly entertaining and relatable." Cementing his impact on Internet culture, in 2015, PewDiePie was included on Times list of the 30 most influential people on the Internet. A few months later, PewDiePie was featured on the cover of Varietys "Famechangers" issue, with the magazine ranking the gamer as the #1 "Famechanger", or "those whose influence stands head and shoulders above the rest."**

 **Influence on video games**

 **PewDiePie's commentaries have had a positive effect on sales of indie games. For instance the developers of McPixel stated, "The largest force driving attention to McPixel at that time were 'Let's Play' videos. Mostly by Jesse Cox and PewDiePie." PewDiePie has also been confirmed to positively influence the sales of Slender: The Eight Pages and Goat Simulator.**

 **PewDiePie, along with characters from Amnesia: The Dark Descent, which PewDiePie renamed and made characters within his own commentaries were referenced to by a McPixel level designed in his honor. Additionally, in the video game Surgeon Simulator 2013, the Alien Surgery stage features an organ called "Pewdsball" in honor of PewDiePie. PewDiePie agreed to allow the developers of Surgeon Simulator 2013 to use his likeness in GOTY IDST, a showering simulation video game. PewDiePie was also included as a NPC in the indie game, Party Hard.**

 **Relationship with income and charity**

 **PewDiePie's popularity has allowed him to stir support for fundraising drives. In February 2012, PewDiePie ran for King of the Web, an online contest. He lost the overall title, however still became the "Gaming King of the Web" for the 1–15 February 2012 voting period. During the following voting period, PewDiePie won and donated his cash winnings to the World Wildlife Fund. He has raised money for the St. Jude Children's Research Hospital.**

 **PewDiePie also began a "Water Campaign" charity, where his fans could donate money to Charity: Water, in celebration of reaching ten million subscribers. PewDiePie also contributed one dollar to the charity for every 500 views the video announcing the campaign accumulates, up to a maximum of $10,000. PewDiePie had the goal of raising US$, however at the end of the drive, the amount raised was $. In June 2014, PewDiePie, announced that a fourth charity drive for "Save the Children" raised over $630,000, surpassing a $250,000 goal. In an interview with the Swedish magazine Icon, he has expressed desire to continue these drives as time goes on, and also credited John and Hank Green as two individuals who gave him the idea of making unique videos for charity. PewDiePie confirmed on Reddit that the figures were roughly around what he actually earned. On the topic of his earnings, PewDiePie stated that he is "extremely tired of talking about how much I make. In the very few interviews I've made, it doesn't matter how long we've talked to each other, the headline is still just about my paycheck." Additionally, PewDiePie has stated, "I'm not out to max my income. I think my viewers would call me on that right away if I did. I've seen other YouTubers start selling and it's a mistake." After a large amount of media outlets spread this information, Kjellberg posted a video, expressing his frustration at the extensive media coverage over his income. He also claimed, "I really think that money doesn't make you happy. I am just as happy as I am now as I was five years ago. I am very happy that I don't have to worry about paying rent because that was a huge issue when came over from Sweden, we could barely afford it." Additionally, he read through critical Facebook comments, stating, "A lot of people which I saw were very very angry. They thought it was unfair. They thought I just sit on my ass all day, and I just yell at the screen over here." The gamer went on to respond to a comment that stated that anyone could do what he does, "I think that's what's cool about YouTube: That anyone could technically do it, right? Surely if I didn't exist, there would be someone to fill my place."**

 **The Guardian noted that the reason the media was so captivated by PewDiePie's earnings is that the topic "offers a rare insight into the money being made at the top end of YouTube stardom," adding, "it's very rare for any YouTube creator to talk about their earnings publicly, not least because YouTube itself does not encourage it." Forbes detailed, "$7 million may well seem like an astronomical figure to a 25 year-old who just wants to make friends and play videogames, but it's a wildly insubstantial figure for the size of his audience and influence."**

 **Marketing campaigns**

 **Beginning in April 2014 and spanning into August, Kjellberg, along with his girlfriend Marzia Bisognin, began a marketing campaign for the Legendary Pictures film As Above, So Below. Kjellberg's videos for the marketing campaign included a miniseries featuring him participating in the "Catacombs Challenge". The challenge involved Kjellberg searching for three keys in the catacombs to open a container holding "the Philosopher's stone." Kjellberg and Bisognin's videos were able to earn nearly 20 million views. Maker Studios, which Kjellberg and Bisognin are represented by, brokered the ad deal between the two and Legendary Pictures. In the same month, a quote from the gamer was used by Techland on Dying Light posters. The quote, which read, "I love this game. It's sooo awesome!", spread controversy as it came from a seemingly advertorial video, featuring the gamer playing Dying Light. In response to the issue, PewDiePie tweeted, "I love this game.**

 **It's soooo awesome! - IGN."**

 **Despite these partnerships, PewDiePie maintains that he conducts very few promotions and works with few brands. Additionally, PewDiePie posted on Reddit, "I make more than I need from YouTube," adding, "with that freedom, but also to respect my fans for making that possible, I don't end up doing many endorsements." On this topic, PewDiePie has claimed that it is disappointing when a large chunk of people misinterpret a component of his character; the gamer states, "if I mention on Twitter that I find this or that Kickstarter project cool, people immediately start to ask what economical interests I might have in it. Things like that can bring me down. But it's not personal; some people just prefer to believe the worst about others at any given time." Despite being signed under a network, PewDiePie refuses to hire an editor to help him with his video output, stating "I want YouTube to be YouTube."**

 **PewDiePie has expressed disdain with Machinima, a rival YouTube network that he had been signed with prior to Maker Studios. Feeling frustrated with how Machinima treated him, PewDiePie hired a lawyer to free him from his contract with the network. Reports that covered this information also added that PewDiePie expressed his frustrations with the studio's parent company, Disney; PewDiePie was quoted saying, "The fact that Disney bought Maker Studios doesn't really change anything for me. If I ask for help, they reply, but that's all the contact we have. We'll see what happens." Rather than re-sign with Maker, PewDiePie has mulled the option of launching his own network, although he has declined to provide in-depth details on the subject. However, in light of news outlets reporting the gamer's disinterest with Maker, PewDiePie tweeted, "I feel like I was misquoted in the WSJ and I'm really happy with the work that Maker has been doing for me."**

 **In early 2015, Nintendo launched its Creator Program, in order to share revenue with YouTube video creators who feature gameplay of their products in videos. PewDiePie joined various gamers in criticising the programme. Despite criticisms from PewDiePie and other gamers alike, Nintendo experienced more requests from YouTube creators than expected, causing an extension on the 72-hour wait time for video approval through the program. Ultimately, the focal point of criticism is toward the approval of a video which Nintendo has to administer, and may be motivated by biased intentions. In July 2013, PewDiePie starred alongside Anthony Padilla and Ian Hecox of Smosh, as well as Jenna Marbles, as guest judges on the second season of Internet Icon. PewDiePie also appeared in the 2013 and 2014 editions of YouTube's annual year-end Rewind series.**

 **In June 2014 Sveriges Radio let Kjellberg host an episode of the radio show Sommar i P1. The episode was recorded in both Swedish and English; the Swedish version was broadcast 9 August 2014 in Sveriges Radio P1, and the English version was published online, on a dedicated server with extra capacity to avoid crashing the Sveriges Radio server. The link to the Swedish version of the broadcast was shared over 3,500 times, and the link to the English version was shared about 49,000 times.**

 **In December 2014, PewDiePie guest starred in two episodes of the 18th season of South Park, one of his favourite series. The two episodes served as a two-part season finale. The first part, titled "#REHASH" aired on 3 December, while the second part, titled "#HappyHolograms", aired on 10 December. In the episodes, he parodied himself and other Let's Play commentators, who added commentary over Call of Duty gameplay in an overly expressive way. In "#REHASH", the character Kyle wonders why his brother and his brother's friends favour watching others comment on events over experiencing events themselves.**

 **In October, PewDiePie appeared as a guest on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert; PewDiePie's charm and Colbert's interviewing skills were well received by online media outlets.**

 **Other ventures**

 **On 24 September 2015, PewDiePie released his long-awaited video game ''PewDiePie: Legend of the Brofist on iOS and Android. The game is developed by Canadian game developer Outerminds in collaboration with Kjellberg himself.**

 **Penguin Group released PewDiePie's This Book Loves You, a parody of self-help books, on 20 October 2015.**

 **Personal life**

 **PewDiePie is originally from Sweden she is also a YouTube personality. The two were introduced to each other through a friend of Bisognin's in 2011, and after establishing an online friendship, the gamer flew to Italy to meet her. PewDiePie moved to the UK in July 2013 for better Internet connectivity. PewDiePie admits that he enjoys living in Brighton, as he is able to live in general anonymity, adding that one of the reasons he has not moved to Los Angeles is, "Anytime I'm there, people are constantly patting you on the back, telling you how great you are. It fucks with your brain. I started YouTube because I was bored, not to become famous."**

 **\- valign "top"**

 **rowspan "2" 2014 Teen Choice Awards Web Star: Gaming align "center"**

 **\- valign "top"**

 **4th Streamy Awards Best Gaming Channel, Show, or Series align "center"**

 **\- valign "top"**

 **rowspan "3" 2015 Teen Choice Awards Choice Web Star: Male align "center"**

 **rowspan "2" 5th Streamy Awards Best First-Person Channel, Show, or Series align "center"**

 **Best Gaming Channel, Show, or Series align "center"**

 **}**

 **See also**

 **List of the most subscribed users on YouTube**

 **List of YouTube personalities**

 **PewDiePie: Legend of the Brofist**

 **References**

 **Notes**

 **Further reading**

 **Bibliography**

 **External links**

 **Sveriges Radio –**

 **YouTube stuff**

 **YouTube is a video-sharing website headquartered in San Bruno, California, United States. The service was created by three former employees in February 2005. In November 2006, it was bought by Google for US$1.65 billion. YouTube now operates as one of Google's subsidiaries. The site allows users to upload, view, and share videos, and it makes use of WebM, H.264/MPEG-4 AVC, and Adobe Flash Video technology to display a wide variety of user-generated and corporate media video. Available content includes video clips, TV clips, music videos, and other content such as video blogging, short original videos, and educational videos.**

 **Most of the content on YouTube has been uploaded by individuals, but media corporations including CBS, the BBC, Vevo, Hulu, and other organizations offer some of their material via YouTube, as part of the YouTube partnership program. Unregistered users can watch videos, and registered users can upload videos to their channels. Videos considered to contain potentially offensive content are available only to registered users affirming themselves to be at least 18 years old.**

 **Company history**

 **YouTube was founded by Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim, who were all early employees of . Hurley had studied design at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, and Chen and Karim studied computer science together at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.**

 **According to a story that has often been repeated in the media, Hurley and Chen developed the idea for YouTube during the early months of 2005, after they had experienced difficulty sharing videos that had been shot at a dinner party at Chen's apartment in San Francisco. Karim did not attend the party and denied that it had occurred, but Chen commented that the idea that YouTube was founded after a dinner party "was probably very strengthened by marketing ideas around creating a story that was very digestible".**

 **Karim said the inspiration for YouTube first came from Janet Jackson's role in the 2004 Super Bowl incident, when her breast was exposed during her performance, and later from the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. Karim could not easily find video clips of either event online, which led to the idea of a video sharing site. Hurley and Chen said that the original idea for YouTube was a video version of an online dating service, and had been influenced by the website Hot or Not.**

 **YouTube began as a venture-funded technology startup, primarily from a $11.5 million investment by Sequoia Capital between November 2005 and April 2006. YouTube's early headquarters were situated above a pizzeria and Japanese restaurant in San Mateo, California. The domain name .com was activated on February 14, 2005, and the website was developed over the subsequent months.**

 **The first YouTube video, titled Me at the zoo, shows co-founder Jawed Karim at the San Diego Zoo. The video was uploaded on April 23, 2005, and can still be viewed on the site.**

 **YouTube offered the public a beta test of the site in May 2005, six months before the official launch in November 2005. The site grew rapidly, and in July 2006 the company announced that more than 65,000 new videos were being uploaded every day, and that the site was receiving 100 million video views per day. According to data published by market research company comScore, YouTube is the dominant provider of online video in the United States, with a market share of around 43% and more than 14 billion views of videos in May 2010.**

 **In 2014 YouTube said that 300 hours of new videos were uploaded to the site every minute, three times more than one year earlier and that around three quarters of the material comes from outside the U.S. The site has 800 million unique users a month. It is estimated that in 2007 YouTube consumed as much bandwidth as the entire Internet in 2000. According to third-party web analytics providers, Alexa and SimilarWeb, YouTube is the third most visited website in the world, as of June 2015; SimilarWeb also lists YouTube as the top TV and video website globally, attracting more than 15 billion visitors per month.**

 **The choice of the name .com led to problems for a similarly named website, .com. The site's owner, Universal Tube & Rollform Equipment, filed a lawsuit against YouTube in November 2006 after being regularly overloaded by people looking for YouTube. Universal Tube has since changed the name of its website to .com.**

 **In October 2006, Google Inc. announced that it had acquired YouTube for $1.65 billion in Google stock, and the deal was finalized on November 13, 2006.**

 **Google does not provide detailed figures for YouTube's running costs, and YouTube's revenues in 2007 were noted as "not material" in a regulatory filing. In June 2008, a Forbes magazine article projected the 2008 revenue at $200 million, noting progress in advertising sales. In January 2012, it was estimated that visitors to YouTube spent an average of 15 minutes a day on the site, in contrast to the four or five hours a day spent by a typical U.S. citizen watching television. In November 2008, YouTube reached an agreement with MGM, Lions Gate Entertainment, and CBS, allowing the companies to post full-length films and television episodes on the site, accompanied by advertisements in a section for US viewers called "Shows". The move was intended to create competition with websites such as Hulu, which features material from NBC, Fox, and Disney. In November 2009, YouTube launched a version of "Shows" available to UK viewers, offering around 4,000 full-length shows from more than 60 partners. In January 2010, YouTube introduced an online film rentals service, which is available only to users in the US, Canada and the UK as of 2010. The service offers over 6,000 films.**

 **In March 2010, YouTube began free streaming of certain content, including 60 cricket matches of the Indian Premier League. According to YouTube, this was the first worldwide free online broadcast of a major sporting event.**

 **On March 31, 2010, the YouTube website launched a new design, with the aim of simplifying the interface and increasing the time users spend on the site. Google product manager Shiva Rajaraman commented: "We really felt like we needed to step back and remove the clutter." In May 2010, it was reported that YouTube was serving more than two billion videos a day, which it described as "nearly double the prime-time audience of all three major US television networks combined". In May 2011, YouTube reported in its company blog that the site was receiving more than three billion views per day.**

 **In April 2011, James Zern, a YouTube software engineer, revealed that 30% of videos accounted for 99% of views on the site.**

 **In November 2011, the Google+ social networking site was integrated directly with YouTube and the Chrome web browser, allowing YouTube videos to be viewed from within the Google+ interface.**

 **In December 2011, YouTube launched a new version of the site interface, with the video channels displayed in a central column on the home page, similar to the news feeds of social networking sites. At the same time, a new version of the YouTube logo was introduced with a darker shade of red, the first change in design since October 2006.**

 **In May 2013, YouTube launched a pilot program to begin offering some content providers the ability to charge $0.99 per month or more for certain channels, but the vast majority of its videos would remain free to view.**

 **In February 2015, YouTube announced the launch of a new app specifically for use by children visiting the site, called YouTube Kids. It allows parental controls and restrictions on who can upload content, and is available for both Android and iOS devices. Later in August 26, 2015, YouTube Gaming was launched, a platform for video gaming enthusiasts intended to compete with . 2015 also saw the announcement of a premium YouTube service titles YouTube Red, which provides users with both ad-free content as well as the ability to download videos among other features.**

 **On August 10, 2015, Google announced that it was creating a new company, Alphabet, to act as the holding company for Google, with the change in financial reporting to begin in the fourth quarter of 2015. YouTube remains as a subsidiary of Google.**

 **Features**

 **Video technology**

 **Playback**

 **Previously, viewing YouTube videos on a personal computer required the Adobe Flash Player plug-in to be installed in the browser.**

 **In January 2010, YouTube launched an experimental version of the site that used the built-in multimedia capabilities of web browsers supporting the HTML5 standard. This allowed videos to be viewed without requiring Adobe Flash Player or any other plug-in to be installed. The YouTube site had a page that allowed supported browsers to opt into the HTML5 trial. Only browsers that supported HTML5 Video using the H.264 or WebM formats could play the videos, and not all videos on the site were available.**

 **On January 27, 2015, YouTube announced that HTML5 will be the default playback method on supported browsers. Supported browsers include Google Chrome, Safari 8, and Internet Explorer 11.**

 **YouTube experimented with Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP, which is an adaptive bit-rate HTTP-based streaming solution optimizing the bitrate and quality for the available network. Currently they are using Adobe Dynamic Streaming for Flash.**

 **Uploading**

 **All YouTube users can upload videos up to 15 minutes each in duration. Users who have a good track record of complying with the site's Community Guidelines may be offered the ability to upload videos up to 12 hours in length, which requires verifying the account, normally through a mobile phone. When YouTube was launched in 2005, it was possible to upload long videos, but a ten-minute limit was introduced in March 2006 after YouTube found that the majority of videos exceeding this length were unauthorized uploads of television shows and films. The 10-minute limit was increased to 15 minutes in July 2010. If an up-to-date browser version is used, videos greater than 20 GB can be uploaded.**

 **YouTube accepts videos uploaded in most container formats, including .AVI, .MKV, .MOV, .MP4, DivX, .FLV, and .ogg and .ogv. These include video formats such as MPEG-4, MPEG, VOB, and .WMV. It also supports 3GP, allowing videos to be uploaded from mobile phones. Videos with progressive scanning or interlaced scanning can be uploaded, but for the best video quality, YouTube suggests interlaced videos be deinterlaced before uploading. All the video formats on YouTube use progressive scanning.**

 **Quality and formats**

 **YouTube originally offered videos at only one quality level, displayed at a resolution of 320×240 pixels using the Sorenson Spark codec, with mono MP3 audio. In June 2007, YouTube added an option to watch videos in 3GP format on mobile phones. In March 2008, a high-quality mode was added, which increased the resolution to 480×360 pixels.**

 **In November 2008, 720p HD support was added. At the time of the 720p launch, the YouTube player was changed from a 4:3 aspect ratio to a widescreen 16:9. With this new feature, YouTube began a switchover to H.264/MPEG-4 AVC as its default video compression format. In November 2009, 1080p HD support was added. In July 2010, YouTube announced that it had launched a range of videos in 4K format, which allows a resolution of up to 4096×3072 pixels. In June 2015, support for 8K resolution was added, with the videos playing at 7680×4320 pixels.**

 **In June 2014, YouTube introduced videos playing at 60 frames per second, in order to reproduce video games with a frame rate comparable to high-end graphics cards. The videos play back at a resolution of 720p or higher.**

 **YouTube videos are available in a range of quality levels. The former names of standard quality, high quality and high definition have been replaced by numerical values representing the vertical resolution of the video. The default video stream is encoded in the VP9 format with stereo Opus audio; if VP9/WebM is not supported in the browser/device or the browser's user agent reports Windows XP, then H.264/MPEG-4 AVC video with stereo AAC audio is used instead.**

 **Comparison of YouTube media encoding options**

 **Non-DASH**

 **itag is an undocumented parameter used internally by YouTube to**

 **differentiate between quality profiles. Until December 2010, there was also a**

 **URL parameter known as fmt that allowed a user to force a profile using**

 **itag codes.**

 **Approximate values based on statistical data; actual bitrate can be higher or**

 **lower due to variable encoding rate.**

 **Encoded in 15 FPS.**

 **Encoded in 60 FPS.**

 **Depends on the resolution of the source HFR video.**

 **Available in the DASH manifest and on YouTube's content distribution servers, but not used in playback.**

 **Has metadata referring to "Elemental Technologies Live".**

 **Used as alternate audio tracks.**

 **3D videos**

 **In a video posted on July 21, 2009, YouTube software engineer Peter Bradshaw announced that YouTube users can now upload 3D videos. The videos can be viewed in several different ways, including the common anaglyph method which utilizes glasses worn by the viewer to achieve the 3D effect. The YouTube Flash player can display stereoscopic content interleaved in rows, columns or a checkerboard pattern, side-by-side or anaglyph using a red/cyan, green/magenta or blue/yellow combination. In May 2011, an HTML5 version of the YouTube player began supporting side-by-side 3D footage that is compatible with Nvidia 3D Vision.**

 **Content accessibility**

 **YouTube offers users the ability to view its videos on web pages outside their website. Each YouTube video is accompanied by a piece of HTML that can be used to embed it on any page on the Web. This functionality is often used to embed YouTube videos in social networking pages and blogs. Users wishing to post a video discussing, inspired by or related to another user's video are able to make a "video response". On August 27, 2013, YouTube announced that it would remove video responses for being an underused feature. Embedding, rating, commenting and response posting can be disabled by the video owner.**

 **YouTube does not usually offer a download link for its videos, and intends for them to be viewed through its website interface. A small number of videos, such as the weekly addresses by President Barack Obama, can be downloaded as MP4 files. Numerous third-party web sites, applications and browser plug-ins allow users to download YouTube videos. In February 2009, YouTube announced a test service, allowing some partners to offer video downloads for free or for a fee paid through Google Checkout. In June 2012, Google sent cease and desist letters threatening legal action against several websites offering online download and conversion of YouTube videos. In response, Zamzar removed the ability to download YouTube videos from its site. The default settings when uploading a video to YouTube will retain a copyright on the video for the uploader, but since July 2012 it has been possible to select a Creative Commons license as the default, allowing other users to reuse and remix the material if it is free of copyright.**

 **Platforms**

 **Most modern smartphones are capable of accessing YouTube videos, either within an application or through an optimized website. YouTube Mobile was launched in June 2007, using RTSP streaming for the video. Not all of YouTube's videos are available on the mobile version of the site.**

 **Since June 2007, YouTube's videos have been available for viewing on a range of Apple products. This required YouTube's content to be transcoded into Apple's preferred video standard, H.264, a process that took several months. YouTube videos can be viewed on devices including Apple TV, iPod Touch and the iPhone. In July 2010, the mobile version of the site was relaunched based on HTML5, avoiding the need to use Adobe Flash Player and optimized for use with touch screen controls. The mobile version is also available as an app for the Android platform. In September 2012, YouTube launched its first app for the iPhone, following the decision to drop YouTube as one of the preloaded apps in the iPhone 5 and iOS 6 operating system. According to GlobalWebIndex, YouTube was used by 35% of smartphone users between April and June 2013, making it the third most used app.**

 **A TiVo service update in July 2008 allowed the system to search and play YouTube videos. In January 2009, YouTube launched "YouTube for TV", a version of the website tailored for set-top boxes and other TV-based media devices with web browsers, initially allowing its videos to be viewed on the PlayStation 3 and Wii video game consoles. In June 2009, YouTube XL was introduced, which has a simplified interface designed for viewing on a standard television screen. YouTube is also available as an app on Xbox Live. On November 15, 2012, Google launched an official app for the Wii, allowing users to watch YouTube videos from the Wii channel. An app is also available for Wii U and Nintendo 3DS, and videos can be viewed on the Wii U Internet Browser using HTML5. Google made YouTube available on the Roku player on December 17, 2013 and in October 2014, the Sony PlayStation 4.**

 **Localization**

 **On June 19, 2007, Google CEO Eric Schmidt was in Paris to launch the new localization system.**

 **{ class "wikitable sortable collapsible collapsed"**

 **! Country**

 **! Language**

 **! Launch date**

 **English**

 **English**

 **Chinese, and English**

 **Chinese**

 **English**

 **English**

 **German**

 **Russian**

 **Korean**

 **Hindi, Bengali, English, Gujarati, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Tamil, Telugu, and Urdu**

 **Hebrew, and English**

 **Czech**

 **Swedish**

 **Afrikaans, Zulu, and English**

 **French, and Arabic**

 **Arabic**

 **Filipino, and English**

 **English**

 **French, and Dutch**

 **English**

 **English**

 **Spanish**

 **Hungarian**

 **Malay, and English**

 **Spanish**

 **Arabic, and English**

 **Greek**

 **Indonesian, and English**

 **English**

 **French, and English**

 **Turkish**

 **Ukrainian**

 **Danish**

 **Finnish**

 **Norwegian**

 **German, French, and Italian**

 **German**

 **Romanian**

 **Portuguese**

 **Slovak**

 **Arabic**

 **Arabic**

 **Croatian**

 **Estonian**

 **Latvian**

 **Lithuanian**

 **Macedonian, Serbian, and Turkish**

 **Serbian, and Croatian**

 **Serbian**

 **Slovenian**

 **Thai**

 **Arabic**

 **The interface of the YouTube website is available in 76 language versions, including Amharic, Albanian, Armenian, Bengali, Burmese, Khmer, Kyrgyz, Laotian, Mongolian, Persian, Urdu and Uzbek, which do not have local channel versions.**

 **Access to YouTube was blocked in Turkey between 2008 and 2010, following controversy over the posting of videos deemed insulting to Mustafa Kemal Atatürk and some material offensive to Muslims. In October 2012, a local version of YouTube was launched in Turkey, with the domain .tr. The local version is subject to the content regulations found in Turkish law.**

 **In March 2009, a dispute between YouTube and the British royalty collection agency PRS for Music led to premium music videos being blocked for YouTube users in the United Kingdom. The removal of videos posted by the major record companies occurred after failure to reach agreement on a licensing deal. The dispute was resolved in September 2009. In April 2009, a similar dispute led to the removal of premium music videos for users in Germany.**

 **YouTube Red**

 **YouTube Red is YouTube's premium subscription service. It offers advertising-free streaming, access to exclusive content, background and offline video playback on mobile devices, and access to the Google Play Music "All Access" service. YouTube Red was originally announced on November 12, 2014, as "Music Key", a subscription music streaming service, and was intended to integrate with and replace the existing Google Play Music "All Access" service. On October 28, 2015, the service was re-launched as YouTube Red, offering ad-free streaming of all videos, as well as access to exclusive original content.**

 **April Fools**

 **YouTube has featured an April Fools prank on the site on April 1 of every year since 2008:**

 **2008: All the links to the videos on the main page were redirected to Rick Astley's music video "Never Gonna Give You Up", a prank known as "Rickrolling".**

 **2009: When clicking on a video on the main page, the whole page turned upside down. YouTube claimed that this was a new layout.**

 **2010: YouTube temporarily released a "TEXTp" mode, which translated the colors in the videos to random upper case letters. YouTube claimed in a message that this was done in order to reduce bandwidth costs by $1 per second.**

 **2011: The site celebrated its "100th anniversary" with a "1911 button" and a range of sepia-toned silent, early 1900s-style films, including "Flugelhorn Feline", a parody of Keyboard Cat.**

 **2012: Clicking on the image of a DVD next to the site logo led to a video about "The YouTube Collection", an option to order every YouTube video for home delivery on DVD, videocassette, Laserdisc, or Betamax tapes. The spoof promotional video touted "the complete YouTube experience completely offline."**

 **2013: YouTube teamed up with newspaper satire company The Onion to claim that the video sharing website was launched as a contest which had finally come to an end, and would announce a winner of the contest when the site went back up in 2023. A video of two presenters announcing the nominees streamed live for twelve hours.**

 **2014: YouTube announced that it was responsible for the creation of all viral video trends, and revealed previews of upcoming memes, such as "Clocking", "Kissing Dad", and "Glub Glub Water Dance".**

 **2015: YouTube added a music button to the video bar that played samples from "Sandstorm" by Darude. Additionally, when users searched for a song title, a message would appear saying "Did you mean: Darude - Sandstorm by Darude".**

 **Social impact**

 **Both private individuals have used YouTube to grow audiences. Independent content creators have built grassroots followings numbering in the thousands at very little cost or effort, while mass retail and radio promotion proved problematic. Concurrently, old media celebrities moved into the website at the invitation of a YouTube management that witnessed early content creators accruing substantial followings, and perceived audience sizes potentially larger than that attainable by television. and its ten highest-earning channels grossing from $2.5 million to $12 million—in 2012 CMU business editor characterized YouTube as "a free-to-use... promotional platform for the music labels". In 2013 Forbes' Katheryn Thayer asserted that digital-era artists' work must not only be of high quality, but must elicit reactions on the YouTube platform and social media. In 2013, videos of the 2.5% of artists categorized as "mega", "mainstream" and "mid-sized" received 90.3% of the relevant views on YouTube and Vevo. By early 2013 Billboard had announced that it was factoring YouTube streaming data into calculation of the Billboard Hot 100 and related genre charts.**

 **Observing that face-to-face communication of the type that online videos convey has been "fine-tuned by millions of years of evolution", TED curator Chris Anderson referred to several YouTube contributors and asserted that "what Gutenberg did for writing, online video can now do for face-to-face communication". Anderson asserted that it's not far-fetched to say that online video will dramatically accelerate scientific advance, and that video contributors may be about to launch "the biggest learning cycle in human history."**

 **YouTube was awarded a 2008 George Foster Peabody Award, the website being described as a Speakers' Corner that "both embodies and promotes democracy." The Washington Post reported that a disproportionate share of YouTube's most subscribed channels feature minorities, contrasting with mainstream television in which the stars are largely white.**

 **A Pew Research Center study reported the development of "visual journalism", in which citizen eyewitnesses and established news organizations share in content creation. The study also concluded that YouTube was becoming an important platform by which people acquire news.**

 **YouTube has enabled people to more directly engage with government, such as in the CNN/YouTube presidential debates in which ordinary people submitted questions to U.S. presidential candidates via YouTube video, with a techPresident co-founder saying that Internet video was changing the political landscape. Describing the Arab Spring, sociologist Philip N. Howard quoted an activist's succinct description that organizing the political unrest involved using "Facebook to schedule the protests, Twitter to coordinate, and YouTube to tell the world." In 2012, more than a third of the U.S. Senate introduced a resolution condemning Joseph Kony 16 days after the "Kony 2012" video was posted to YouTube, with resolution co-sponsor Senator Lindsey Graham remarking that the video "will do more to lead to demise than all other action combined."**

 **Conversely, YouTube has also allowed government to more easily engage with citizens, the White House's official YouTube channel being the seventh top news organization producer on YouTube in 2012 and in 2013 a healthcare exchange commissioned Obama impersonator Iman Crosson's YouTube music video spoof to encourage young Americans to enroll in the Affordable Care Act -compliant health insurance. In February 2014, U.S. President Obama held a meeting at the White House with leading YouTube content creators to not only promote awareness of Obamacare but more generally to develop ways for government to better connect with the "YouTube Generation". Whereas YouTube's inherent ability to allow presidents to directly connect with average citizens was noted, the YouTube content creators' new media savvy was perceived necessary to better cope with the website's distracting content and fickle audience.**

 **TED curator Chris Anderson described a phenomenon by which geographically distributed individuals in a certain field share their independently developed skills in YouTube videos, thus challenging others to improve their own skills, and spurring invention and evolution in that field.**

 **The Legion of Extraordinary Dancers and the YouTube Symphony Orchestra Further, the cybercollaboration charity video "We Are the World 25 for Haiti " was formed by mixing performances of 57 globally distributed singers into a single musical work, with The Tokyo Times noting the "We Pray for You" YouTube cyber-collaboration video as an example of a trend to use crowdsourcing for charitable purposes.**

 **The anti-bullying It Gets Better Project expanded from a single YouTube video directed to discouraged or suicidal LGBT teens, that within two months drew video responses from hundreds including U.S. President Barack Obama, Vice President Biden, White House staff, and several cabinet secretaries. Similarly, in response to fifteen-year-old Amanda Todd's video "My story: Struggling, bullying, suicide, self harm", legislative action was undertaken almost immediately after her suicide to study the prevalence of bullying and form a national anti-bullying strategy.**

 **Revenue sources**

 **The vast majority of videos on YouTube are free to view and supported by advertising. YouTube typically takes 45 percent of the advertising revenue from videos in the Partner Program, with 55 percent going to the uploader. There are over a million members of the YouTube Partner Program. According to TubeMogul, in 2013 a pre-roll advertisement on YouTube cost advertisers on average $7.60 per 1000 views. Usually no more than half of eligible videos have a pre-roll advertisement, due to a lack of interested advertisers. Assuming pre-roll advertisements on half of videos, a YouTube partner would earn 0.5 X $7.60 X 55% $2.09 per 1000 views in 2013. The move was seen as an attempt to compete with other providers of online subscription services such as Netflix and Hulu. Despite this advice, there are still many unauthorized clips of copyrighted material on YouTube. YouTube does not view videos before they are posted online, and it is left to copyright holders to issue a DMCA takedown notice pursuant to the terms of the Online Copyright Infringement Liability Limitation Act. Three successful complaints for copyright infringement against a user account will result in the account and all of its uploaded videos being deleted.**

 **Organizations including Viacom, Mediaset, and the English Premier League have filed lawsuits against YouTube, claiming that it has done too little to prevent the uploading of copyrighted material. Viacom, demanding $1 billion in damages, said that it had found more than 150,000 unauthorized clips of its material on YouTube that had been viewed "an astounding 1.5 billion times". YouTube responded by stating that it "goes far beyond its legal obligations in assisting content owners to protect their works".**

 **During the same court battle, Viacom won a court ruling requiring YouTube to hand over 12 terabytes of data detailing the viewing habits of every user who has watched videos on the site. The decision was criticized by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which called the court ruling "a setback to privacy rights". In June 2010, Viacom's lawsuit against Google was rejected in a summary judgment, with U.S. federal Judge Louis L. Stanton stating that Google was protected by provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Viacom announced its intention to appeal the ruling.**

 **On April 5, 2012, the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit reinstated the case, allowing Viacom's lawsuit against Google to be heard in court again. On March 18, 2014, the lawsuit was settled after seven years with an undisclosed agreement.**

 **In August 2008, a US court ruled in Lenz v. Universal Music Corp. that copyright holders cannot order the removal of an online file without first determining whether the posting reflected fair use of the material. The case involved Stephanie Lenz from Gallitzin, Pennsylvania, who had made a home video of her 13-month-old son dancing to Prince's song "Let's Go Crazy", and posted the 29-second video on YouTube.**

 **In the case of Smith v. Summit Entertainment LLC, professional singer Matt Smith sued Summit Entertainment for the wrongful use of copyright takedown notices on YouTube. He asserted seven causes of action, and four were ruled in Smith's favor.**

 **In April 2012, a court in Hamburg ruled that YouTube could be held responsible for copyrighted material posted by its users. The performance rights organization GEMA argued that YouTube had not done enough to prevent the uploading of German copyrighted music. YouTube responded by stating:**

 **As of 2013, YouTube and GEMA have still not reached a licensing agreement. As a result, most videos containing copyrighted music have been blocked in Germany since 2009.**

 **In April 2013, it was reported that Universal Music Group and YouTube have a contractual agreement that prevents content blocked on YouTube by a request from UMG from being restored, even if the uploader of the video files a DMCA counter-notice. When a dispute occurs, the uploader of the video has to contact UMG.**

 **Youtube's owner Google announced in November 2015 that they would help cover the legal cost in select cases where they believe "fair use" laws apply.**

 **Content ID**

 **In June 2007, YouTube began trials of a system for automatic detection of uploaded videos that infringe copyright. The system was regarded by Google CEO Eric Schmidt as necessary for resolving lawsuits such as the one from Viacom, which alleged that YouTube profited from pirated content. The system, which became known as Content ID, creates an ID File for copyrighted audio and video material, and stores it in a database. When a video is uploaded, it is checked against the database, and flags the video as a copyright violation if a match is found.**

 **When this occurs, the content owner has the choice of blocking the video to make it unviewable, tracking the viewing statistics of the video, or adding advertisements to the video. YouTube describes Content ID as "very accurate in finding uploads that look similar to reference files that are of sufficient length and quality to generate an effective ID File".**

 **An independent test in 2009 uploaded multiple versions of the same song to YouTube, and concluded that while the system was "surprisingly resilient" in finding copyright violations in the audio tracks of videos, it was not infallible. The use of Content ID to remove material automatically has led to controversy in some cases, as the videos have not been checked by a human for fair use. If a YouTube user disagrees with a decision by Content ID, it is possible to fill in a form disputing the decision. YouTube has cited the effectiveness of Content ID as one of the reasons why the site's rules were modified in December 2010 to allow some users to upload videos of unlimited length.**

 **Controversial content**

 **YouTube has also faced criticism over the offensive content in some of its videos. The uploading of videos containing defamation, pornography, and material encouraging criminal conduct is prohibited by YouTube's terms of service. Controversial content has included that pertaining to Holocaust denial and the Hillsborough disaster, in which 96 football fans from Liverpool were crushed to death in 1989.**

 **YouTube relies on its users to flag the content of videos as inappropriate, and a YouTube employee will view a flagged video to determine whether it violates the site's terms of service. British security minister Pauline Neville-Jones commented: "These Web sites would categorically not be allowed in the U.K. They incite cold-blooded murder, and as such are surely contrary to the public good." YouTube pulled some of the videos in November 2010, stating they violated the site's guidelines prohibiting "dangerous or illegal activities such as bomb-making, hate speech and incitement to commit violent acts", or came from accounts "registered by a member of a designated foreign terrorist organization". In December 2010, YouTube added "promotes terrorism" to the list of reasons that users can give when flagging a video as inappropriate.**

 **User comments**

 **Most videos enable users to leave comments, and these have attracted attention for the negative aspects of both their form and content. In 2006, Time praised Web 2.0 for enabling "community and collaboration on a scale never seen before", and added that YouTube "harnesses the stupidity of crowds as well as its wisdom. Some of the comments on YouTube make you weep for the future of humanity just for the spelling alone, never mind the obscenity and the naked hatred". The Guardian in 2009 described users' comments on YouTube as:**

 **In September 2008, The Daily Telegraph commented that YouTube was "notorious" for "some of the most confrontational and ill-formed comment exchanges on the internet", and reported on YouTube Comment Snob, "a new piece of software that blocks rude and illiterate posts". The Huffington Post noted in April 2012 that finding comments on YouTube that appear "offensive, stupid and crass" to the "vast majority" of the people is hardly difficult.**

 **On November 6, 2013, Google implemented a new comment system that requires all YouTube users to use a Google+ account in order to comment on videos and making the comment system Google+ oriented. The changes are in large part an attempt to address the frequent criticisms of the quality and tone of YouTube comments. They give creators more power to moderate and block comments, and add new sorting mechanisms to ensure that better, more relevant discussions appear at the top. The new system restored the ability to include URLs in comments, which had previously been removed due to problems with abuse. In response, YouTube co-founder Jawed Karim posted the question "why the fuck do I need a google+ account to comment on a video?" on his YouTube channel to express his negative opinion of the change. The official YouTube announcement received 20,097 "thumbs down" votes and generated more than 32,000 comments in two days. Writing in the Newsday blog Silicon Island, Chase Melvin noted that "Google+ is nowhere near as popular a social media network as Facebook, but it's essentially being forced upon millions of YouTube users who don't want to lose their ability to comment on videos" and "Discussion forums across the Internet are already bursting with outcry against the new comment system". In the same article Melvin goes on to say:**

 **On July 27, 2015, Google announced in a blog post that it would be removing the requirement to sign up to a Google+ account to post comments to YouTube.**

 **View counts**

 **In December 2012, two billion views were removed from the view counts of Universal and Sony music videos on YouTube, prompting a claim by The Daily Dot that the views had been deleted due to a violation of the site's terms of service, which ban the use of automated processes to inflate view counts. This was disputed by Billboard, which said that the two billion views had been moved to Vevo, since the videos were no longer active on YouTube.**

 **On August 5, 2015, YouTube removed the feature of the site which caused a video's view count to freeze at "301" until the actual count was verified to prevent view count fraud. YouTube view counts now update in real time.**

 **Censorship and filtering**

 **As of September 2012, countries with standing national bans on YouTube include China, Iran, Pakistan, and Turkmenistan.**

 **YouTube is blocked for a variety of reasons, including:**

 **limiting public exposure to content that may ignite social or political unrest;**

 **preventing criticism of a ruler, government, government officials, religion, or religious leaders;**

 **violations of national laws, including:**

 **copyright and intellectual property protection laws;**

 **violations of hate speech, ethics, or morality-based laws; and**

 **national security legislation.**

 **preventing access to videos judged to be inappropriate for youth;**

 **reducing distractions at work or school; and**

 **reducing the amount of network bandwidth used.**

 **In some countries, YouTube is completely blocked, either through a long term standing ban or for more limited periods of time such as during periods of unrest, the run-up to an election, or in response to upcoming political anniversaries. In other countries access to the website as a whole remains open, but access to specific videos is blocked. In cases where the entire site is banned due to one particular video, YouTube will often agree to remove or limit access to that video in order to restore service. The block was later lifted and then reinstated after Iran's 2009 presidential election. In 2012, Iran reblocked access, along with access to Google, after the controversial film Innocence of Muslims' trailer was released on YouTube.**

 **Thailand blocked access between 2006 and 2007 due to offensive videos relating to King Bhumibol Adulyadej.**

 **Some Australian state education departments block YouTube citing "an inability to determine what sort of video material might be accessed" and "There's no educational value to it and the content of the material on the site."**

 **China blocked access from October 15, 2007, to March 22, 2008, and again starting on March 24, 2009. Access remains blocked.**

 **Morocco blocked access in May 2007, possibly as a result of videos critical of Morocco's actions in Western Sahara. YouTube became accessible again on May 30, 2007, after Maroc Telecom unofficially announced that the denied access to the website was a mere "technical glitch".**

 **Turkey blocked access between 2008 and 2010 after controversy over videos deemed insulting to Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. In November 2010, a video of the Turkish politician Deniz Baykal caused the site to be blocked again briefly, and the site was threatened with a new shutdown if it did not remove the video. During the two and a half year block of YouTube, the video-sharing website remained the eighth most-accessed site in Turkey. In 2014, Turkey blocked the access for the second time, after "a high-level intelligence leak."**

 **Pakistan blocked access on February 23, 2008, because of "offensive material" towards the Islamic faith, including display of the Danish cartoons of Muhammad. This led to a near global blackout of the YouTube site for around two hours, as the Pakistani block was inadvertently transferred to other countries. On February 26, 2008, the ban was lifted after the website had removed the objectionable content from its servers at the request of the government. Many Pakistanis circumvented the three-day block by using virtual private network software. In May 2010, following the Everybody Draw Mohammed Day, Pakistan again blocked access to YouTube, citing "growing sacrilegious content". The ban was lifted on May 27, 2010, after the website removed the objectionable content from its servers at the request of the government. However, individual videos deemed offensive to Muslims posted on YouTube will continue to be blocked. Pakistan again placed a ban on YouTube in September 2012, after the site refused to remove the film Innocence of Muslims, with the ban still in operation as of September 2013.**

 **Turkmenistan blocked access on December 25, 2009, for unknown reasons. Other websites, such as LiveJournal were also blocked.**

 **Libya blocked access on January 24, 2010, because of videos that featured demonstrations in the city of Benghazi by families of detainees who were killed in Abu Salim prison in 1996, and videos of family members of Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi at parties. The blocking was criticized by Human Rights Watch. In November 2011, after the Libyan Civil War, YouTube was once again allowed in Libya.**

 **Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Russia, and Sudan blocked access in September 2012 following controversy over a 14-minute trailer for the film Innocence of Muslims which had been posted on the site.**

 **In Libya and Egypt, the Innocence of Muslims trailer was blamed for violent protests in September 2012. YouTube stated that "This video—which is widely available on the Web—is clearly within our guidelines and so will stay on YouTube. However, given the very difficult situation in Libya and Egypt we have temporarily restricted access in both countries."**

 **Music Key licensing**

 **In May 2014, prior to the launch of YouTube's subscription-based Music Key service, the independent music trade organization Worldwide Independent Network alleged that YouTube was using non-negotiable contracts with independent labels that were "undervalued" in comparison to other streaming services, and that YouTube would block all music content from labels who do not reach a deal to be included on the paid service. In a statement to the Financial Times in June 2014, Robert Kyncl confirmed that YouTube would block the content of labels who do not negotiate deals to be included in the paid service "to ensure that all content on the platform is governed by its new contractual terms." Stating that 90% of labels had reached deals, he went on to say that "while we wish that we had 100% success rate, we understand that is not likely an achievable goal and therefore it is our responsibility to our users and the industry to launch the enhanced music experience." The Financial Times later reported that YouTube had reached an aggregate deal with Merlin Network—a trade group representing over 20,000 independent labels, for their inclusion in the service. However, YouTube itself has not confirmed the deal.**

 **See also**

 **CNN-YouTube presidential debates**

 **List of most viewed YouTube videos**

 **List of YouTubers**

 **Ouellette v. Viacom International Inc.**

 **Reply Girls**

 **YouTube Awards**

 **YouTube Instant**

 **YouTube Live**

 **YouTube Multi Channel Network**

 **YouTube Symphony Orchestra**

 **Viacom International Inc. v. YouTube, Inc.**

 **Jacksepticeye**

 **Seán William McLoughlin, known on YouTube as his pseudonym Jacksepticeye, is an Irish YouTube game commentator, known primarily for his comedic Let's Play series on video games and occasionally vlogs.**

 **Internet video career**

 **"Jacksepticeye" is the "most energetic video game commentator on YouTube." As of November 2015, he currently has over 7.3 million subscribers, 3.0 billion views, and 1,999 uploaded videos, with 931,000+ followers on Twitter.**

 **He does various series on games, where the episodes of a particular series are spaced out with usually three to five days in between. One of the two non-video-game series he does is "Reading Your Comments", where he responds to different tones on various social media sites, ranging from mean comments to supportive ones. The second is regular vlogs, where he usually talks about his life or the current events to do with the channel. Most videos contain strong language.**

 **References**

 **External links**

 **The study of books**

 **A book is a set of written, printed, illustrated, or blank sheets, made of ink, paper, parchment, or other materials, fastened together to hinge at one side. A single sheet within a book is a leaf, and each side of a leaf is a page. A set of text-filled or illustrated pages produced in electronic format is known as an electronic book, or e-book.**

 **Books may also refer to works of literature, or a main division of such a work. In library and information science, a book is called a monograph, to distinguish it from serial periodicals such as magazines, journals or newspapers. The body of all written works including books is literature. In novels and sometimes other types of books, a book may be divided into several large sections, also called books . An avid reader of books is a bibliophile or colloquially, bookworm.**

 **A shop where books are bought and sold is a bookshop or bookstore. Books can also be borrowed from libraries. Google has estimated that as of 2010, approximately 130,000,000 unique titles had been published. In some wealthier nations, printed books are giving way to the usage of electronic or e-books, though sales of e-books declined in the first half of 2015.**

 **Etymology**

 **The word book comes from Old English "bōc", which in turn comes from the Germanic root " bōk-", cognate to "beech". Similarly, in Slavic languages "** **буква"** **is cognate with "beech". In Russian and in Serbian and Macedonian, the word "** **букварь"** **or "** **буквар"** **refers specifically to a primary school textbook that helps young children master the techniques of reading and writing.**

 **It is thus conjectured that the earliest Indo-European writings may have been carved on beech wood. Similarly, the Latin word codex, meaning a book in the modern sense, originally meant "block of wood".**

 **History of books**

 **Antiquity**

 **When writing systems were created in ancient civilizations, a variety of objects, such as stone, clay, tree bark, metal sheets, might be used for writing. The study of such inscriptions forms a major part of history. The study of inscriptions is known as epigraphy. Alphabetic writing emerged in Egypt. The Ancient Egyptians would often write on papyrus, a plant grown along the Nile River. At first the words were not separated from each other and there was no punctuation. Texts were written from right to left, left to right, or even so that alternate lines read in opposite directions. The technical term for that last type of writing is 'boustrophedon', which means literally 'ox-turning' for the way a farmer drives an ox to plough his fields.**

 **Tablet**

 **A tablet might be defined as a physically robust writing medium, suitable for casual transport and writing. See also stylus.**

 **Clay tablets were flattened and mostly dry pieces of clay that could be easily carried, and impressed with a stylus. They were used as a writing medium, especially for writing in cuneiform, throughout the Bronze Age and well into the Iron Age.**

 **Wax tablets were pieces of wood covered in a thick enough coating of wax to record the impressions of a stylus. They were the normal writing material in schools, in accounting, and for taking notes. They had the advantage of being reusable: the wax could be melted, and reformed into a blank. The custom of binding several wax tablets together is a possible precursor for modern books . The etymology of the word codex also suggests that it may have developed from wooden wax tablets.**

 **Scroll**

 **Papyrus, a thick paper-like material made by weaving the stems of the papyrus plant, then pounding the woven sheet with a hammer-like tool, was used for writing in Ancient Egypt, perhaps as early as the First Dynasty, although the first evidence is from the account books of King Nefertiti Kakai of the Fifth Dynasty . Papyrus sheets were glued together to form a scroll. Tree bark such as lime and other materials were also used.**

 **According to Herodotus, the Phoenicians brought writing and papyrus to Greece around the 10th or 9th century BC. The Greek word for papyrus as writing material and book come from the Phoenician port town Byblos, through which papyrus was exported to Greece. From Greek we also derive the word tome, which originally meant a slice or piece and from there began to denote "a roll of papyrus". Tomus was used by the Latins with exactly the same meaning as volumen .**

 **Whether made from papyrus, parchment, or paper, scrolls were the dominant form of book in the Hellenistic, Roman, Chinese, Hebrew, and Macedonian cultures. The more modern codex book format form took over the Roman world by late antiquity, but the scroll format persisted much longer in Asia.**

 **Codex**

 **Isidore of Seville explained the then-current relation between codex, book and scroll in his Etymologiae : "A codex is composed of many books; a book is of one scroll. It is called codex by way of metaphor from the trunks of trees or vines, as if it were a wooden stock, because it contains in itself a multitude of books, as it were of branches." Modern usage differs.**

 **A codex is the first information repository that modern people would recognize as a "book": leaves of uniform size bound in some manner along one edge, and typically held between two covers made of some more robust material. The first written mention of the codex as a form of book is from Martial, in his Apophoreta CLXXXIV at the end of the first century, where he praises its compactness. However, the codex never gained much popularity in the pagan Hellenistic world, and only within the Christian community did it gain widespread use. This change happened gradually during the 3rd and 4th centuries, and the reasons for adopting the codex form of the book are several: the format is more economical, as both sides of the writing material can be used; and it is portable, searchable, and easy to conceal. A book is much easier to read, to find a page that you want, and to flip through. A scroll is more awkward to use. The Christian authors may also have wanted to distinguish their writings from the pagan and Judaic texts written on scrolls. In addition, some metal books were made, that required smaller pages of metal, instead of an impossibly long, unbending scroll of metal. A book can also be easily stored in more compact places, or side by side in a tight library or shelf space.**

 **Manuscripts**

 **The fall of the Roman Empire in the 5th century A.D. saw the decline of the culture of ancient Rome. Papyrus became difficult to obtain due to lack of contact with Egypt, and parchment, which had been used for centuries, became the main writing material.**

 **Monasteries carried on the Latin writing tradition in the Western Roman Empire. Cassiodorus, in the monastery of Vivarium, stressed the importance of copying texts. St. Benedict of Nursia, in his Rule of Saint Benedict later also promoted reading. The Rule of Saint Benedict, which set aside certain times for reading, greatly influenced the monastic culture of the Middle Ages and is one of the reasons why the clergy were the predominant readers of books. The tradition and style of the Roman Empire still dominated, but slowly the peculiar medieval book culture emerged.**

 **Before the invention and adoption of the printing press, almost all books were copied by hand, which made books expensive and comparatively rare. Smaller monasteries usually had only a few dozen books, medium-sized perhaps a few hundred. By the 9th century, larger collections held around 500 volumes and even at the end of the Middle Ages, the papal library in Avignon and Paris library of the Sorbonne held only around 2,000 volumes.**

 **The scriptorium of the monastery was usually located over the chapter house. Artificial light was forbidden for fear it may damage the manuscripts. There were five types of scribes:**

 **Calligraphers, who dealt in fine book production**

 **Copyists, who dealt with basic production and correspondence**

 **Correctors, who collated and compared a finished book with the manuscript from which it had been produced**

 **Illuminators, who painted illustrations**

 **Rubricators, who painted in the red letters**

 **The bookmaking process was long and laborious. The parchment had to be prepared, then the unbound pages were planned and ruled with a blunt tool or lead, after which the text was written by the scribe, who usually left blank areas for illustration and rubrication. Finally, the book was bound by the bookbinder.**

 **Different types of ink were known in antiquity, usually prepared from soot and gum, and later also from gall nuts and iron vitriol. This gave writing a brownish black color, but black or brown were not the only colors used. There are texts written in red or even gold, and different colors were used for illumination. For very luxurious manuscripts the whole parchment was colored purple, and the text was written on it with gold or silver .**

 **Irish monks introduced spacing between words in the 7th century. This facilitated reading, as these monks tended to be less familiar with Latin. However, the use of spaces between words did not become commonplace before the 12th century. It has been argued that the use of spacing between words shows the transition from semi-vocalized reading into silent reading.**

 **The first books used parchment or vellum for the pages. The book covers were made of wood and covered with leather. Because dried parchment tends to assume the form it had before processing, the books were fitted with clasps or straps. During the later Middle Ages, when public libraries appeared, up to the 18th century, books were often chained to a bookshelf or a desk to prevent theft. These chained books are called libri catenati.**

 **At first, books were copied mostly in monasteries, one at a time. With the rise of universities in the 13th century, the Manuscript culture of the time led to an increase in the demand for books, and a new system for copying books appeared. The books were divided into unbound leaves, which were lent out to different copyists, so the speed of book production was considerably increased. The system was maintained by secular stationers guilds, which produced both religious and non-religious material.**

 **Judaism has kept the art of the scribe alive up to the present. According to Jewish tradition, the Torah scroll placed in a synagogue must be written by hand on parchment and a printed book would not do, though the congregation may use printed prayer books and printed copies of the Scriptures are used for study outside the synagogue. A sofer "scribe" is a highly respected member of any observant Jewish community.**

 **Middle East**

 **People of various religious and ethnic backgrounds in the Middle East also produced and bound books in the Islamic Golden Age, developing advanced techniques in Islamic calligraphy, miniatures and bookbinding. A number of cities in the medieval Islamic world had book production centers and book markets. Yaqubi says that in his time Baghdad had over a hundred booksellers. Book shops were often situated around the town's principal mosque as in Marrakesh, Morocco, that has a street named Kutubiyyin or book sellers in English and the famous Koutoubia Mosque is named so because of its location in this street.**

 **The medieval Muslim world also used a method of reproducing reliable copies of a book in large quantities known as check reading, in contrast to the traditional method of a single scribe producing only a single copy of a single manuscript. In the check reading method, only "authors could authorize copies, and this was done in public sessions in which the copyist read the copy aloud in the presence of the author, who then certified it as accurate." With this check-reading system, "an author might produce a dozen or more copies from a single reading," and with two or more readings, "more than one hundred copies of a single book could easily be produced."**

 **By using as writing material the relatively cheap paper instead of parchment or papyrus the Muslims, in the words of Pedersen "accomplished a feat of crucial significance not only to the history of the Islamic book, but also to the whole world of books"**

 **Wood block printing**

 **In woodblock printing, a relief image of an entire page was carved into blocks of wood, inked, and used to print copies of that page. This method originated in China, in the Han dynasty, as a method of printing on textiles and later paper, and was widely used throughout East Asia. The oldest dated book printed by this method is The Diamond Sutra .**

 **The method arrived in Europe in the early 14th century. Books, as well as playing-cards and religious pictures, began to be produced by this method. Creating an entire book was a painstaking process, requiring a hand-carved block for each page; and the wood blocks tended to crack, if stored for long. The monks or people who wrote them were paid highly.**

 **Movable type and incunabula**

 **The Chinese inventor Bi Sheng made movable type of earthenware circa 1045, but there are no known surviving examples of his printing. Around 1450, in what is commonly regarded as an independent invention, Johannes Gutenberg invented movable type in Europe, along with innovations in casting the type based on a matrix and hand mould. This invention gradually made books less expensive to produce, and more widely available.**

 **Early printed books, single sheets and images which were created before 1501 in Europe are known as incunables or incunabula. "A man born in 1453, the year of the fall of Constantinople, could look back from his fiftieth year on a lifetime in which about eight million books had been printed, more perhaps than all the scribes of Europe had produced since Constantine founded his city in A.D. 330."**

 **Modern world**

 **Steam-powered printing presses became popular in the early 19th century. These machines could print 1,100 sheets per hour, but workers could only set 2,000 letters per hour.**

 **Monotype and linotype typesetting machines were introduced in the late 19th century. They could set more than 6,000 letters per hour and an entire line of type at once.**

 **The centuries after the 15th century were thus spent on improving both the printing press and the conditions for freedom of the press through the gradual relaxation of restrictive censorship laws. See also intellectual property, public domain, copyright. In mid-20th century, European book production had risen to over 200,000 titles per year.**

 **Book manufacture in modern times**

 **The methods used for the printing and binding of books continued fundamentally unchanged from the 15th century into the early 20th century. While there was more mechanization, a book printer in 1900 had much in common with Gutenberg.**

 **Gutenberg's invention was the use of movable metal types, assembled into words, lines, and pages and then printed by letterpress to create multiple copies.**

 **Modern paper books are printed on papers designed specifically for printed books. Traditionally, book papers are off-white or low-white papers, are opaque to minimise the show-through of text from one side of the page to the other and are made to tighter caliper or thickness specifications, particularly for case-bound books. Different paper qualities are used depending on the type of book: Machine finished coated papers, woodfree uncoated papers, coated fine papers and special fine papers are common paper grades.**

 **Today, the majority of books are printed by offset lithography. When a book is printed the pages are laid out on the plate so that after the printed sheet is folded the pages will be in the correct sequence. Books tend to be manufactured nowadays in a few standard sizes. The sizes of books are usually specified as "trim size": the size of the page after the sheet has been folded and trimmed. The standard sizes result from sheet sizes which became popular 200 or 300 years ago, and have come to dominate the industry. British conventions in this regard prevail throughout the English-speaking world, except for the USA. The European book manufacturing industry works to a completely different set of standards.**

 **Current processes**

 **Some books, particularly those with shorter runs will be printed on sheet-fed offset presses, but most books are now printed on web presses, which are fed by a continuous roll of paper, and can consequently print more copies in a shorter time. As the production line circulates, a complete "book" is collected together in one stack, next to another, and another.**

 **A web press carries out the folding itself, delivering bundles of signatures ready to go into the gathering line. Notice that when the book is being printed it is being printed one signatures at a time, not one complete book at a time. Excess numbers are printed to make up for any spoilage due to "make-readies" or test pages to assure final print quality.**

 **A make-ready is the preparatory work carried out by the pressmen to get the printing press up to the required quality of impression. Included in make-ready is the time taken to mount the plate onto the machine, clean up any mess from the previous job, and get the press up to speed. As soon as the pressman decides that the printing is correct, all the make-ready sheets will be discarded, and the press will start making books. Similar make readies take place in the folding and binding areas, each involving spoilage of paper.**

 **After the signatures are folded and gathered, they move into the bindery. In the middle of last century there were still many trade binders – stand-alone binding companies which did no printing, specializing in binding alone. At that time, because of the dominance of letterpress printing, typesetting and printing took place in one location, and binding in a different factory. When type was all metal, a typical book's worth of type would be bulky, fragile and heavy. The less it was moved in this condition the better: so printing would be carried out in the same location as the typesetting. Printed sheets on the other hand could easily be moved. Now, because of increasing computerization of preparing a book for the printer, the typesetting part of the job has flowed upstream, where it is done either by separately contracting companies working for the publisher, by the publishers themselves, or even by the authors. Mergers in the book manufacturing industry mean that it is now unusual to find a bindery which is not also involved in book printing .**

 **If the book is a hardback its path through the bindery will involve more points of activity than if it is a paperback.**

 **Unsewn binding, is now increasingly common. The signatures of a book can also be held together by "Smyth sewing" using needles, "McCain sewing", using drilled holes often used in schoolbook binding, or "notch binding", where gashes about an inch long are made at intervals through the fold in the spine of each signature. The rest of the binding process is similar in all instances. Sewn and notch bound books can be bound as either hardbacks or paperbacks.**

 **Finishing**

 **"Making cases" happens off-line and prior to the book's arrival at the binding line. In the most basic case-making, two pieces of cardboard are placed onto a glued piece of cloth with a space between them into which is glued a thinner board cut to the width of the spine of the book. The overlapping edges of the cloth are folded over the boards, and pressed down to adhere. After case-making the stack of cases will go to the foil stamping area for adding decorations and type.**

 **Digital printing**

 **Recent developments in book manufacturing include the development of digital printing. Book pages are printed, in much the same way as an office copier works, using toner rather than ink. Each book is printed in one pass, not as separate signatures. Digital printing has permitted the manufacture of much smaller quantities than offset, in part because of the absence of make readies and of spoilage. One might think of a web press as printing quantities over 2000, quantities from 250 to 2000 being printed on sheet-fed presses, and digital presses doing quantities below 250. These numbers are of course only approximate and will vary from supplier to supplier, and from book to book depending on its characteristics. Digital printing has opened up the possibility of print-on-demand, where no books are printed until after an order is received from a customer.**

 **E-book**

 **The term e-book is a contraction of "electronic book"; it refers to a book-length publication in digital form. An e-book is usually made available through the internet, but also on CD-ROM and other forms. E-Books may be read either via a computer or by means of a portable book display device known as an e-book reader, such as the Sony Reader, Barnes & Noble Nook, Kobo eReader, or the Amazon Kindle. These devices attempt to mimic the experience of reading a print book.**

 **Information explosion**

 **Throughout the 20th century, libraries have faced an ever-increasing rate of publishing, sometimes called an information explosion. The advent of electronic publishing and the internet means that much new information is not printed in paper books, but is made available online through a digital library, on CD-ROM, or in the form of e-books. An on-line book is an e-book that is available online through the internet.**

 **Though many books are produced digitally, most digital versions are not available to the public, and there is no decline in the rate of paper publishing. There is an effort, however, to convert books that are in the public domain into a digital medium for unlimited redistribution and infinite availability. This effort is spearheaded by Project Gutenberg combined with Distributed Proofreaders.**

 **There have also been new developments in the process of publishing books. Technologies such as POD or "print on demand", which make it possible to print as few as one book at a time, have made self-publishing much easier and more affordable. On-demand publishing has allowed publishers, by avoiding the high costs of warehousing, to keep low-selling books in print rather than declaring them out of print.**

 **Book design**

 **Book design is the art of incorporating the content, style, format, design, and sequence of the various components of a book into a coherent whole.**

 **In the words of Jan Tschichold, book design "though largely forgotten today, methods and rules upon which it is impossible to improve have been developed over centuries. To produce perfect books these rules have to be brought back to life and applied." Richard Hendel describes book design as "an arcane subject" and refers to the need for a context to understand what that means.**

 **Sizes**

 **The size of a modern book is based on the printing area of a common flatbed press. The pages of type were arranged and clamped in a frame, so that when printed on a sheet of paper the full size of the press, the pages would be right side up and in order when the sheet was folded, and the folded edges trimmed.**

 **The most common book sizes are:**

 **Quarto : the sheet of paper is folded twice, forming four leaves approximately 11-13 inches tall**

 **Octavo : the most common size for current hardcover books. The sheet is folded three times into eight leaves up to 9 ¾" tall.**

 **DuoDecimo : a size between 8vo and 16mo, up to 7 ¾" tall**

 **Sextodecimo : the sheet is folded four times, forming 16 leaves up to 6 ¾" tall**

 **Sizes smaller than 16mo are:**

 **24mo: up to 5 ¾" tall.**

 **32mo: up to 5" tall.**

 **48mo: up to 4" tall.**

 **64mo: up to 3" tall.**

 **Small books can be called booklets.**

 **Sizes larger than quarto are:**

 **Folio: up to 15" tall.**

 **Elephant Folio: up to 23" tall.**

 **Atlas Folio: up to 25" tall.**

 **Double Elephant Folio: up to 50" tall.**

 **The largest extant medieval manuscript in the world is Codex Gigas 92 × 50 × 22 cm. The world's largest book is made of stone and is in Kuthodaw Pagoda .**

 **The longest book title in the world is 670 words long .**

 **Types**

 **By content**

 **A common separation by content are fiction and non-fiction books. This simple separation can be found in most collections, libraries, and bookstores.**

 **Fiction**

 **Many of the books published today are fiction, meaning that they are in-part or completely untrue. Historically, paper production was considered too expensive to be used for entertainment. An increase in global literacy and print technology led to the increased publication of books for the purpose of entertainment, and allegorical social commentary. Most fiction is additionally categorized by genre.**

 **The novel is the most common form of fiction book. Novels are stories that typically feature a plot, setting, themes and characters. Stories and narrative are not restricted to any topic; a novel can be whimsical, serious or controversial. The novel has had a tremendous impact on entertainment and publishing markets. A novella is a term sometimes used for fiction prose typically between 17,500 and 40,000 words, and a novelette between 7,500 and 17,500. A Short story may be any length up to 10,000 words, but these word lengths vary.**

 **Comic books or graphic novels are books in which the story is illustrated. The characters and narrators use speech or thought bubbles to express verbal language.**

 **Non-fiction**

 **In a library, a reference book is a general type of non-fiction book which provides information as opposed to telling a story, essay, commentary, or otherwise supporting a point of view. An almanac is a very general reference book, usually one-volume, with lists of data and information on many topics. An encyclopedia is a book or set of books designed to have more in-depth articles on many topics. A book listing words, their etymology, meanings, and other information is called a dictionary. A book which is a collection of maps is an atlas. A more specific reference book with tables or lists of data and information about a certain topic, often intended for professional use, is often called a handbook. Books which try to list references and abstracts in a certain broad area may be called an index, such as Engineering Index, or abstracts such as chemical abstracts and biological abstracts.**

 **Books with technical information on how to do something or how to use some equipment are called instruction manuals. Other popular how-to books include cookbooks and home improvement books.**

 **Students typically store and carry textbooks and schoolbooks for study purposes. Elementary school pupils often use workbooks, which are published with spaces or blanks to be filled by them for study or homework. In US higher education, it is common for a student to take an exam using a blue book.**

 **There is a large set of books that are made only to write private ideas, notes, and accounts. These books are rarely published and are typically destroyed or remain private. Notebooks are blank papers to be written in by the user. Students and writers commonly use them for taking notes. Scientists and other researchers use lab notebooks to record their notes. They often feature spiral coil bindings at the edge so that pages may easily be torn out.**

 **Address books, phone books, and calendar/appointment books are commonly used on a daily basis for recording appointments, meetings and personal contact information.**

 **Books for recording periodic entries by the user, such as daily information about a journey, are called logbooks or simply logs. A similar book for writing the owner's daily private personal events, information, and ideas is called a diary or personal journal.**

 **Businesses use accounting books such as journals and ledgers to record financial data in a practice called bookkeeping.**

 **Other types**

 **There are several other types of books which are not commonly found under this system. Albums are books for holding a group of items belonging to a particular theme, such as a set of photographs, card collections, and memorabilia. One common example is stamp albums, which are used by many hobbyists to protect and organize their collections of postage stamps. Such albums are often made using removable plastic pages held inside in a ringed binder or other similar smolder.**

 **Picture books are books for children with little text and pictures on every page.**

 **Hymnals are books with collections of musical hymns that can typically be found in churches. Prayerbooks or missals are books that contain written prayers and are commonly carried by monks, nuns, and other devoted followers or clergy.**

 **By physical format**

 **Hardcover books have a stiff binding. Paperback books have cheaper, flexible covers which tend to be less durable. An alternative to paperback is the glossy cover, otherwise known as a dust cover, found on magazines, and comic books. Spiral-bound books are bound by spirals made of metal or plastic. Examples of spiral-bound books include teachers' manuals and puzzle books .**

 **Publishing is a process for producing pre-printed books, magazines, and newspapers for the reader/user to buy.**

 **Publishers may produce low-cost, pre-publication copies known as galleys or 'bound proofs' for promotional purposes, such as generating reviews in advance of publication. Galleys are usually made as cheaply as possible, since they are not intended for sale.**

 **Libraries**

 **Private or personal libraries made up of non-fiction and fiction books, first appeared in classical Greece. In ancient world the maintaining of a library was usually the privilege of a wealthy individual. These libraries could have been either private or public, i.e. for people who were interested in using them. The difference from a modern public library lies in the fact that they were usually not funded from public sources. It is estimated that in the city of Rome at the end of the 3rd century there were around 30 public libraries. Public libraries also existed in other cities of the ancient Mediterranean region . Later, in the Middle Ages, monasteries and universities had also libraries that could be accessible to general public. Typically not the whole collection was available to public, the books could not be borrowed and often were chained to reading stands to prevent theft.**

 **The beginning of modern public library begins around 15th century when individuals started to donate books to towns. The growth of a public library system in the United States started in the late 19th century and was much helped by donations from Andrew Carnegie. This reflected classes in a society: The poor or the middle class had to access most books through a public library or by other means while the rich could afford to have a private library built in their homes. In the United States the Boston Public Library 1852 Report of the Trustees established the justification for the public library as a tax-supported institution intended to extend educational opportunity and provide for general culture.**

 **The advent of paperback books in the 20th century led to an explosion of popular publishing. Paperback books made owning books affordable for many people. Paperback books often included works from genres that had previously been published mostly in pulp magazines. As a result of the low cost of such books and the spread of bookstores filled with them owning a private library ceased to be a status symbol for the rich.**

 **In library and booksellers' catalogues, it is common to include an abbreviation such as "Crown 8vo" to indicate the paper size from which the book is made.**

 **When rows of books are lined on a book holder, bookends are sometimes needed to keep them from slanting.**

 **Identification and classification**

 **During the 20th century, librarians were concerned about keeping track of the many books being added yearly to the Gutenberg Galaxy. Through a global society called the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions, they devised a series of tools including the International Standard Bibliographic Description .**

 **Each book is specified by an International Standard Book Number, or ISBN, which is unique to every edition of every book produced by participating publishers, world wide. It is managed by the ISBN Society. An ISBN has four parts: the first part is the country code, the second the publisher code, and the third the title code. The last part is a check digit, and can take values from 0–9 and X . The EAN Barcodes numbers for books are derived from the ISBN by prefixing 978, for Bookland, and calculating a new check digit.**

 **Commercial publishers in industrialized countries generally assign ISBNs to their books, so buyers may presume that the ISBN is part of a total international system, with no exceptions. However, many government publishers, in industrial as well as developing countries, do not participate fully in the ISBN system, and publish books which do not have ISBNs.**

 **A large or public collection requires a catalogue. Codes called "call numbers" relate the books to the catalogue, and determine their locations on the shelves. Call numbers are based on a Library classification system. The call number is placed on the spine of the book, normally a short distance before the bottom, and inside.**

 **Institutional or national standards, such as ANSI/NISO Z39.41 - 1997, establish the correct way to place information on book spines, and on "shelvable" book-like objects, such as containers for DVDs, video tapes and software.**

 **One of the earliest and most widely known systems of cataloguing books is the Dewey Decimal System. Another widely known system is the Library of Congress Classification system. Both systems are biased towards subjects which were well represented in US libraries when they were developed, and hence have problems handling new subjects, such as computing, or subjects relating to other cultures.**

 **Information about books and authors can be stored in databases like online general-interest book databases.**

 **Metadata about a book may include its ISBN or other classification number, the names of contributors and publisher, its date and size, and the language of the text.**

 **Classification systems**

 **Bliss bibliographic classification**

 **Chinese Library Classification**

 **Colon Classification**

 **Dewey Decimal Classification**

 **Harvard-Yenching Classification**

 **Library of Congress Classification**

 **New Classification Scheme for Chinese Libraries**

 **Universal Decimal Classification**

 **Uses**

 **Aside from the primary purpose of reading them, books are also used for other ends:**

 **A book can be an artistic artifact, a piece of art; this is sometimes known as an artists' book.**

 **A book may be evaluated by a reader or professional writer to create a book review.**

 **A book may be read by a group of people to use as a spark for social or academic discussion, as in a book club.**

 **A book may be studied by students as the subject of a writing and analysis exercise in the form of a book report.**

 **Books are sometimes used for their exterior appearance to decorate a room, such as a study.**

 **Paper and conservation**

 **Paper was first made in China as early as 200 BC, and reached Europe through Muslim territories. At first made of rags, the industrial revolution changed paper-making practices, allowing for paper to be made out of wood pulp. Papermaking in Europe began in the 11th century, although vellum was also common there as page material up until the beginning of 16th century, vellum being the more expensive and durable option. Printers or publishers would often issue the same publication on both materials, to cater to more than one market.**

 **Paper made from wood pulp became popular in the early 20th century, because it was cheaper than linen or abaca cloth-based papers. Pulp-based paper made books less expensive to the general public. This paved the way for huge leaps in the rate of literacy in industrialised nations, and enabled the spread of information during the Second Industrial Revolution.**

 **Pulp paper, however, contains acid which eventually destroys the paper from within. Earlier techniques for making paper used limestone rollers, which neutralized the acid in the pulp. Books printed between 1850 and 1950 are primarily at risk; more recent books are often printed on acid-free or alkaline paper. Libraries today have to consider mass deacidification of their older collections in order to prevent decay.**

 **Stability of the climate is critical to the long-term preservation of paper and book material. Good air circulation is important to keep fluctuation in climate stable. The HVAC system should be up to date and functioning efficiently. Light is detrimental to collections. Therefore, care should be given to the collections by implementing light control. General housekeeping issues can be addressed, including pest control. In addition to these helpful solutions, a library must also make an effort to be prepared if a disaster occurs, one that they cannot control. Time and effort should be given to create a concise and effective disaster plan to counteract any damage incurred through "acts of god" therefore an emergency management plan should be in place.**

 **See also**

 **Artist's book**

 **Audiobook**

 **Book burning**

 **Booksellers**

 **Lists of books**

 **Open access book**

 **Bibliodiversity**

 **References**

 **External links**

 **, Smithsonian Institution Libraries**

 **The Earth**

 **World is a common name for the whole of human civilization, specifically human experience, history, or the human condition in general, worldwide, i.e. anywhere on Earth or pertaining to anywhere on earth.**

 **In a philosophical context it may refer to:**

 **# the whole of the physical Universe, or**

 **# an ontological world .**

 **In a theological context, world usually refers to the material or the profane sphere, as opposed to the celestial, spiritual, transcendent or sacred. The "end of the world" refers to scenarios of the final end of human history, often in religious contexts.**

 **World history is commonly understood as spanning the major geopolitical developments of about five millennia, from the first civilizations to the present.**

 **World population is the sum of all human populations at any time; similarly, world economy is the sum of the economies of all societies, especially in the context of globalization. Terms like world championship, gross world product, world flags etc. also imply the sum or combination of all current-day sovereign states.**

 **In terms such as world religion, world language, world government, and world war, world suggests international or intercontinental scope without necessarily implying participation of the entire world.**

 **In terms such as world map and world climate, world is used in the sense detached from human culture or civilization, referring to the planet Earth physically.**

 **Etymology and usage**

 **The English word world comes from the Old English weorold, weorld, worold, a compound of wer "man" and eld "age," which thus means roughly "Age of Man."**

 **The Old English is a reflex of the Common Germanic wira-alđiz, also reflected in Old Saxon werold, Old High German weralt, Old Frisian warld and Old Norse verǫld .**

 **The corresponding word in Latin is mundus, literally "clean, elegant", itself a loan translation of Greek cosmos "orderly arrangement." While the Germanic word thus reflects a mythological notion of a "domain of Man", presumably as opposed to the divine sphere on the one hand and the chthonic sphere of the underworld on the other, the Greco-Latin term expresses a notion of creation as an act of establishing order out of chaos.**

 **'World' distinguishes the entire planet or population from any particular country or region: world affairs pertain not just to one place but to the whole world, and world history is a field of history that examines events from a global perspective. Earth, on the other hand, refers to the planet as a physical entity, and distinguishes it from other planets and physical objects.**

 **'World' was also classically used to mean the material universe, or the cosmos: "The worlde is an apte frame of heauen and earthe, and all other naturall thinges contained in them." The earth was often described as 'the center of the world'.**

 **'World' can also be used attributively, to mean 'global', 'relating to the whole world', forming usages such as world community or world canonical texts.**

 **By extension, a 'world' may refer to any planet or heavenly body, especially when it is thought of as inhabited, especially in the context of science fiction or futurology.**

 **'World', in its original sense, when qualified, can also refer to a particular domain of human experience.**

 **The world of work describes paid work and the pursuit of a career, in all its social aspects, to distinguish it from home life and academic study.**

 **The fashion world describes the environment of the designers, fashion houses and consumers that make up the fashion industry.**

 **historically, the New World vs. the Old World, referring to the parts of the world colonized in the wake of the age of discovery. Now mostly used in zoology and botany, as in New World monkey.**

 **Philosophy**

 **In philosophy, the term world has several possible meanings. In some contexts, it refers to everything that makes up reality or the physical universe. In others, it can mean have a specific ontological sense . While clarifying the concept of world has arguably always been among the basic tasks of Western philosophy, this theme appears to have been raised explicitly only at the start of the twentieth century and has been the subject of continuous debate. The question of what the world is has by no means been settled.**

 **Parmenides**

 **The traditional interpretation of Parmenides' work is that he argued that the everyday perception of reality of the physical world is mistaken, and that the reality of the world is 'One Being' : an unchanging, ungenerated, indestructible whole.**

 **Plato**

 **In his Allegory of the Cave, Plato distinguishes between forms and ideas and imagines two distinct worlds : the sensible world and the intelligible world.**

 **Hegel**

 **In Hegel's philosophy of history, the expression Weltgeschichte ist Weltgericht is used to assert the view that History is what judges men, their actions and their opinions. Science is born from the desire to transform the World in relation to Man; its final end is technical application.**

 **Schopenhauer**

 **The World as Will and Representation is the central work of Arthur Schopenhauer.**

 **Schopenhauer saw the human will as our one window to the world behind the representation; the Kantian thing-in-itself. He believed, therefore, that we could gain knowledge about the thing-in-itself, something Kant said was impossible, since the rest of the relationship between representation and thing-in-itself could be understood by analogy to the relationship between human will and human body.**

 **Wittgenstein**

 **Two definitions that were both put forward in the 1920s, however, suggest the range of available opinion. "The world is everything that is the case," wrote Ludwig Wittgenstein in his influential Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, first published in 1922. This definition would serve as the basis of logical positivism, with its assumption that there is exactly one world, consisting of the totality of facts, regardless of the interpretations that individual people may make of them.**

 **Heidegger**

 **Martin Heidegger, meanwhile, argued that "the surrounding world is different for each of us, and notwithstanding that we move about in a common world". The world, for Heidegger, was that into which we are always already "thrown" and with which we, as beings-in-the-world, must come to terms. His conception of "world disclosure" was most notably elaborated in his 1927 work Being and Time.**

 **Freud**

 **In response, Sigmund Freud proposed that we do not move about in a common world, but a common thought process. He believed that all the actions of a person are motivated by one thing: lust. This led to numerous theories about reactionary consciousness.**

 **Other**

 **Some philosophers, often inspired by David Lewis, argue that metaphysical concepts such as possibility, probability and necessity are best analyzed by comparing the world to a range of possible worlds; a view commonly known as modal realism.**

 **Religion and mythology**

 **Mythological cosmologies often depict the world as centered around an axis mundi and delimited by a boundary such as a world ocean, a world serpent or similar. In some religions, worldliness is that which relates to this world as opposed to other worlds or realms.**

 **Buddhism**

 **In Buddhism, the world means society, as distinct from the monastery. It refers to the material world, and to worldly gain such as wealth, reputation, jobs, and war. The spiritual world would be the path to enlightenment, and changes would be sought in what we could call the psychological realm.**

 **Christianity**

 **In Christianity, the term often connotes the concept of the fallen and corrupt world order of human society, in contrast to the World to Come. The world is frequently cited alongside the flesh and the Devil as a source of temptation that Christians should flee. Monks speak of striving to be "in this world, but not of this world"—as Jesus said, and the term "worldhood" has been distinguished from "monkhood", the former being the status of merchants, princes, and others who deal with "worldly" things.**

 **This view is clearly expressed by king Alfred the Great of England in his famous Preface to the Cura Pastoralis:**

 **Although Hebrew and Greek words meaning "world" are used in Scripture with the normal variety of senses, many examples of its use in this particular sense can be found in the teachings of Jesus according to the Gospel of John, e.g. 7:7, 8:23, 12:25, 14:17, 15:18-19, 17:6-25, 18:36. For contrast, a relatively newer concept is Catholic imagination.**

 **Contemptus mundi is the name given to the recognition that the world, in all its vanity, is nothing more than a futile attempt to hide from God by stifling our desire for the good and the holy. This view has been criticized as a "pastoral of fear" by modern historian Jean Delumeau.**

 **During the Second Vatican Council, there was a novel attempt to develop a positive theological view of the World, which is illustrated by the pastoral optimism of the constitutions Gaudium et spes, Lumen gentium, Unitatis redintegratio and Dignitatis humanae.**

 **Eastern Christianity**

 **In Eastern Christian monasticism or asceticism the world of mankind is driven by passions. Therefore, the passions of the World are simply called "the world". Each of these passions are a link to the world of mankind or order of human society. Each of these passions must be overcome in order for a person to receive salvation . The process of theosis is a personal relationship with God. This understanding is taught within the works of ascetics like Evagrius Ponticus, and the most seminal ascetic works read most widely by Eastern Christians, the Philokalia and the Ladder of Divine Ascent . At the highest level of world transcendence is hesychasm which culminates into the Vision of God.**

 **Orbis Catholicus**

 **Orbis Catholicus is a Latin phrase meaning Catholic world, per the expression Urbi et Orbi, and refers to that area of Christendom under papal supremacy. It is somewhat similar to the phrases secular world, Jewish world and Islamic world.**

 **See also**

 **Globe**

 **List of sovereign states**

 **Universe**

 **References**

 **External links**

 **Actors**

 **An actor is a person portraying a character in a dramatic or comic production; he or she performs in film, television, theatre, radio, commercials or music videos.**

 **Actor,, literally means "one who interprets"; an actor, then, is one who interprets a dramatic character. Method acting is an approach in which the actor identifies with the portrayed character by recalling emotions or reactions from his or her own life. Presentational acting refers to a relationship between actor and audience, whether by direct address or indirectly by specific use of language, looks, gestures or other signs indicating that the character or actor is aware of the audience's presence. In representational acting, "actors want to make us 'believe' they are the character; they pretend." In modern times, women occasionally played the roles of prepubescent boys.**

 **Terminology**

 **After 1660 in England, when women first started to appear on stage, the terms actor or actress were initially used interchangeably for female performers, but later, influenced by the French actrice, actress became the commonly used term for women in theatre and film. The etymology is a simple derivation from actor with ess added. Actress remains the common term used in major acting awards given to female recipients.**

 **With regards to the cinema of the United States, the gender-neutral term "player" was common in film in the early days of the Motion Picture Production Code, but it is now generally deemed archaic. However, "player" remains in use in the theatre, often incorporated into the name of a theatre group or company, such as the American Players, the East West Players and so on. Also, actors in improvisational theatre may be referred to as "players".**

 **History**

 **The first recorded case of a performing actor occurred in 534 BC when the Greek performer Thespis stepped on to the stage at the Theatre Dionysus to become the first known person to speak words as a character in a play or story. Prior to Thespis' act, stories were only expressed in song, dance, and in third person narrative. In honor of Thespis, actors are commonly called Thespians. To this day, theatrical legend maintains Thespis is a mischievous spirit; disasters in the theatre are sometimes blamed on his ghostly intervention.**

 **Traditionally, actors were not of high status; therefore, in the Early Middle Ages traveling acting troupes were often viewed with distrust. In many parts of Europe, traditional beliefs of the region and time period meant actors could not receive a Christian burial, which left an actor forever condemned. In the 19th and 20th centuries, this negative perception was largely reversed as acting became an honored, popular profession and art.**

 **Techniques**

 **Method acting**

 **Method acting is a term created by Lee Strasberg after leaving the Group Theatre to create his own Actors Studio. The Group Theatre first became known in the 1930s; its practices were subsequently advanced and developed in new directions by Stella Adler, Sanford Meisner, Uta Hagen, Lee Strasberg, and others.**

 **The techniques developed in the work of the Group Theatre were based on the acting theory of Constantin Stanislavski. In the early 20th century, he created his work at the Moscow Art Theatre and its studios. In Stanislavski's system, an actor analyzes the character to play him or her with psychological realism and emotional authenticity. Using this Method to identify with the portrayed character an actor may recall emotions or reactions from his or her own life.**

 **Method actors sometimes immerse themselves so completely in a character such that she or he continues to portray a character off-stage or off-camera for the duration of the project. Although some actors employ this approach, it is generally not taught as part of the Method. Stella Adler, who, along with Strasberg, was a member of the Group Theatre, emphasized a different approach to using creative imagination.**

 **In short, method acting is a system to train and develop an actor's sensory, psychological, and emotional abilities; it revolutionized theatre in the United States.**

 **Presentational and representational acting**

 **Presentational acting refers to a relationship between actor and audience, whether by direct address or indirectly by specific use of language, looks, gestures or other signs indicating that the character or actor is aware of the audience's presence.**

 **In representational acting, "actors want to make us 'believe' they are the character; they pretend."**

 **As opposite sex**

 **Formerly, in some societies, only men could become actors. In ancient Greece and Rome and the medieval world, it was considered disgraceful for a woman to go on stage; this belief persisted until the 17th century, in Venice. In the time of William Shakespeare, women's roles were generally played by men or boys. This prohibition ended during the reign of Charles II in part because he enjoyed watching actresses on stage. The first occurrence of the term actress was in 1700 according to the OED and is ascribed to Dryden.**

 **Theatre actors need to learn blocking, which is "...where and how an actor moves on the stage during a play."**

 **Most scripts specify some blocking. The Director will also give instructions on blocking, such as crossing the stage or picking up and using a prop.**

 **Film actors have to learn to get used to and be comfortable with a camera being in front of them.**

 **Film actors need to learn to find and stay on their "mark." This is a position on the floor marked with tape. This position is where the lights and camera focus are optimized. Film actors also need to learn how to prepare well and perform well on screen tests. Screen tests are a filmed audition of part of the script.**

 **"Unlike the theater actor, who gets to develop a character during...a two- or three-hour performance, the film actor lacks continuity, forcing him or her to come to all the scenes with a character already fully developed." TV actors need to learn to use lav mics .**

 **Radio drama achieved widespread popularity within a decade of its initial development in the 1920s. By the 1940s, it was a leading international popular entertainment. With the advent of television in the 1950s, however, radio drama lost some of its popularity, and in some countries has never regained large audiences. However, recordings of OTR survive today in the audio archives of collectors and museums, as well as several online sites such as Internet Archive.**

 **As of 2011, radio drama has a minimal presence on terrestrial radio in the United States. Much of American radio drama is restricted to rebroadcasts or podcasts of programs from previous decades. However, other nations still have thriving traditions of radio drama. In the United Kingdom, for example, the BBC produces and broadcasts hundreds of new radio plays each year on Radio 3, Radio 4, and Radio 4 Extra. Podcasting has also offered the means of creating new radio dramas, in addition to the distribution of vintage programs.**

 **The terms "audio drama" or "audio theatre" are sometimes used synonymously with "radio drama" with one possible distinction: audio drama or audio theatre may not necessarily be intended specifically for broadcast on radio. Audio drama, whether newly produced or OTR classics, can be found on CDs, cassette tapes, podcasts, webcasts and conventional broadcast radio.**

 **Thanks to advances in digital recording and Internet distribution, radio drama is experiencing a revival.**

 **See also**

 **Bit part**

 **Body double**

 **Cameo appearance**

 **Cast member**

 **Celebrity**

 **Character actor**

 **Child actor**

 **Dramatis personæ**

 **Extra**

 **GOTE**

 **Leading actor**

 **Lists of actors**

 **Matinee idol**

 **Meisner technique**

 **Mime artist**

 **Movie star**

 **Pornographic film actor**

 **Practical Aesthetics**

 **Supporting actor**

 **Understudy**

 **Vaudeville**

 **Voice acting**

 **References**

 **Sources**

 **Csapo, Eric, and William J. Slater. 1994. The Context of Ancient Drama. Ann Arbor: The U of Michigan P. ISBN 0-472-08275-2.**

 **Elam, Keir. 1980. The Semiotics of Theatre and Drama. New Accents Ser. London and New York: Methuen. ISBN 0-416-72060-9.**

 **Weimann, Robert. 1978. Shakespeare and the Popular Tradition in the Theater: Studies in the Social Dimension of Dramatic Form and Function. Ed. Robert Schwartz. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press. ISBN 0-8018-3506-2.**

 **Further reading**

 **An Actor's Work by Constantin Stanislavski**

 **A Dream of Passion: The Development of the Method by Lee Strasberg**

 **Sanford Meisner on Acting by Sanford Meisner**

 **Letters to a Young Actor by Robert Brustein .**

 **The Empty Space by Peter Brook**

 **The Technique of Acting by Stella Adler**

 **External links**

 **: a union representing U. S. film and TV actors.**

 **: a union representing U. S. theatre actors and stage managers.**

 **: a union representing U. S. television and radio actors and broadcasters .**

 **: a trade union representing UK artists, including actors, singers, dancers, choreographers, stage managers, theatre directors and designers, variety and circus artists, television and radio presenters, walk-on and supporting artists, stunt performers and directors and theatre fight directors.**

 **: karel santral servisi karel santral satis kurulum tamir teknnik servisi**

 **: an Australian/New Zealand trade union representing everyone in the media, entertainment, sports, and arts industries.**

 **Love**

 **Love is a variety of different feelings, states, and attitudes that ranges from interpersonal affection to pleasure . It can refer to an emotion of a strong attraction and personal attachment. It can also be a virtue representing human kindness, compassion, and affection—"the unselfish loyal and benevolent concern for the good of another". It may also describe compassionate and affectionate actions towards other humans, one's self or animals.**

 **Non-Western traditions have also distinguished variants or symbioses of these states. This diversity of uses and meanings combined with the complexity of the feelings involved makes love unusually difficult to consistently define, compared to other emotional states.**

 **Love in its various forms acts as a major facilitator of interpersonal relationships and, owing to its central psychological importance, is one of the most common themes in the creative arts.**

 **Love may be understood as a function to keep human beings together against menaces and to facilitate the continuation of the species.**

 **Definitions**

 **The word "love" can have a variety of related but distinct meanings in different contexts. Many other languages use multiple words to express some of the different concepts that in English are denoted as "love"; one example is the plurality of Greek words for "love" which includes agape and eros. Cultural differences in conceptualizing love thus doubly impede the establishment of a universal definition.**

 **Although the nature or essence of love is a subject of frequent debate, different aspects of the word can be clarified by determining what isn't love . Love as a general expression of positive sentiment is commonly contrasted with hate ; as a less sexual and more emotionally intimate form of romantic attachment, love is commonly contrasted with lust; and as an interpersonal relationship with romantic overtones, love is sometimes contrasted with friendship, although the word love is often applied to close friendships. .**

 **Abstractly discussed love usually refers to an experience one person feels for another. Love often involves caring for or identifying with a person or thing, including oneself . In addition to cross-cultural differences in understanding love, ideas about love have also changed greatly over time. Some historians date modern conceptions of romantic love to courtly Europe during or after the Middle Ages, although the prior existence of romantic attachments is attested by ancient love poetry.**

 **The complex and abstract nature of love often reduces discourse of love to a thought-terminating cliché. Several common proverbs regard love, from Virgil's "Love conquers all" to The Beatles' "All You Need Is Love". St. Thomas Aquinas, following Aristotle, defines love as "to will the good of another." Bertrand Russell describes love as a condition of "absolute value," as opposed to relative value. Philosopher Gottfried Leibniz said that love is "to be delighted by the happiness of another." Meher Baba stated that in love there is a "feeling of unity" and an "active appreciation of the intrinsic worth of the object of love." Biologist Jeremy Griffith defines love as "unconditional selflessness".**

 **Impersonal love**

 **A person can be said to love an object, principle, or goal to which they are deeply committed and greatly value. For example, compassionate outreach and volunteer workers' "love" of their cause may sometimes be born not of interpersonal love but impersonal love, altruism, and strong spiritual or political convictions. People can also "love" material objects, animals, or activities if they invest themselves in bonding or otherwise identifying with those things. If sexual passion is also involved, then this feeling is called paraphilia.**

 **Interpersonal love**

 **Interpersonal love refers to love between human beings. It is a much more potent sentiment than a simple liking for another. Unrequited love refers to those feelings of love that are not reciprocated. Interpersonal love is most closely associated with interpersonal relationships. Helen Fisher, a leading expert in the topic of love, divides the experience of love into three partly overlapping stages: lust, attraction, and attachment. Lust is the feeling of sexual desire; romantic attraction determines what partners mates find attractive and pursue, conserving time and energy by choosing; and attachment involves sharing a home, parental duties, mutual defense, and in humans involves feelings of safety and security. Three distinct neural circuitries, including neurotransmitters, and three behavioral patterns, are associated with these three romantic styles.**

 **Since the lust and attraction stages are both considered temporary, a third stage is needed to account for long-term relationships. Attachment is the bonding that promotes relationships lasting for many years and even decades. Attachment is generally based on commitments such as marriage and children, or on mutual friendship based on things like shared interests. It has been linked to higher levels of the chemicals oxytocin and vasopressin to a greater degree than short-term relationships have.**

 **Psychological basis**

 **Psychology depicts love as a cognitive and social phenomenon. Psychologist Robert Sternberg formulated a triangular theory of love and argued that love has three different components: intimacy, commitment, and passion. Intimacy is a form in which two people share confidences and various details of their personal lives, and is usually shown in friendships and romantic love affairs. Commitment, on the other hand, is the expectation that the relationship is permanent. The last and most common form of love is sexual attraction and passion. Passionate love is shown in infatuation as well as romantic love. All forms of love are viewed as varying combinations of these three components. Non-love does not include any of these components. Liking only includes intimacy. Infatuated love only includes passion. Empty love only includes commitment. Romantic love includes both intimacy and passion. Companionate love includes intimacy and commitment. Fatuous love includes passion and commitment. Lastly, consummate love includes all three. American psychologist Zick Rubin sought to define love by psychometrics in the 1970s. His work states that three factors constitute love: attachment, caring, and intimacy.**

 **Following developments in electrical theories such as Coulomb's law, which showed that positive and negative charges attract, analogs in human life were developed, such as "opposites attract." Over the last century, research on the nature of human mating has generally found this not to be true when it comes to character and personality—people tend to like people similar to themselves. However, in a few unusual and specific domains, such as immune systems, it seems that humans prefer others who are unlike themselves, since this will lead to a baby that has the best of both worlds. In recent years, various human bonding theories have been developed, described in terms of attachments, ties, bonds, and affinities.**

 **Some Western authorities disaggregate into two main components, the altruistic and the narcissistic. This view is represented in the works of Scott Peck, whose work in the field of applied psychology explored the definitions of love and evil. Peck maintains that love is a combination of the "concern for the spiritual growth of another," and simple narcissism. In combination, love is an activity, not simply a feeling.**

 **Psychologist Erich Fromm maintained in his book The Art of Loving that love is not merely a feeling but is also actions, and that in fact, the "feeling" of love is superficial in comparison to one's commitment to love via a series of loving actions over time.**

 **Comparison of scientific models**

 **Biological models of love tend to see it as a mammalian drive, similar to hunger or thirst. Modern authors have distinguished further varieties of romantic love. However, with Greek, it has been historically difficult to separate the meanings of these words totally. At the same time, the Ancient Greek text of the Bible has examples of the verb agapo having the same meaning as phileo.**

 **Agape means love in modern-day Greek. The term s'agapo means I love you in Greek. The word agapo is the verb I love. It generally refers to a "pure," ideal type of love, rather than the physical attraction suggested by eros. However, there are some examples of agape used to mean the same as eros. It has also been translated as "love of the soul."**

 **Eros is passionate love, with sensual desire and longing. The Greek word erota means in love. Plato refined his own definition. Although eros is initially felt for a person, with contemplation it becomes an appreciation of the beauty within that person, or even becomes appreciation of beauty itself. Eros helps the soul recall knowledge of beauty and contributes to an understanding of spiritual truth. Lovers and philosophers are all inspired to seek truth by eros. Some translations list it as "love of the body." which is also used in the plural form to indicate love affairs or sexual adventures. This same root also produces amicus—"friend"—and amicitia, "friendship" . Cicero wrote a treatise called On Friendship, which discusses the notion at some length. Ovid wrote a guide to dating called Ars Amatoria, which addresses, in depth, everything from extramarital affairs to overprotective parents.**

 **Latin sometimes uses amāre where English would simply say to like. This notion, however, is much more generally expressed in Latin by placere or delectāre, which are used more colloquially, the latter used frequently in the love poetry of Catullus. Diligere often has the notion "to be affectionate for," "to esteem," and rarely if ever is used for romantic love. This word would be appropriate to describe the friendship of two men. The corresponding noun diligentia, however, has the meaning of "diligence" or "carefulness," and has little semantic overlap with the verb. Observare is a synonym for diligere; despite the cognate with English, this verb and its corresponding noun, observantia, often denote "esteem" or "affection." Caritas is used in Latin translations of the Christian Bible to mean "charitable love"; this meaning, however, is not found in Classical pagan Roman literature. As it arises from a conflation with a Greek word, there is no corresponding verb.**

 **Chinese and other Sinic cultures**

 **Two philosophical underpinnings of love exist in the Chinese tradition, one from Confucianism which emphasized actions and duty while the other came from Mohism which championed a universal love. A core concept to Confucianism is Ren, which focuses on duty, action and attitude in a relationship rather than love itself. In Confucianism, one displays benevolent love by performing actions such as filial piety from children, kindness from parent, loyalty to the king and so forth.**

 **The concept of Ai was developed by the Chinese philosopher Mozi in the 4th century BC in reaction to Confucianism's benevolent love. Mozi tried to replace what he considered to be the long-entrenched Chinese over-attachment to family and clan structures with the concept of "universal love" . In this, he argued directly against Confucians who believed that it was natural and correct for people to care about different people in different degrees. Mozi, by contrast, believed people in principle should care for all people equally. Mohism stressed that rather than adopting different attitudes towards different people, love should be unconditional and offered to everyone without regard to reciprocation, not just to friends, family and other Confucian relations. Later in Chinese Buddhism, the term Ai was adopted to refer to a passionate caring love and was considered a fundamental desire. In Buddhism, Ai was seen as capable of being either selfish or selfless, the latter being a key element towards enlightenment.**

 **In contemporary Chinese, Ai is often used as the equivalent of the Western concept of love. Ai is used as both a verb and a noun . However, due to the influence of Confucian Ren, the phrase 'Wo ai ni' carries with it a very specific sense of responsibility, commitment and loyalty. Instead of frequently saying "I love you" as in some Western societies, the Chinese are more likely to express feelings of affection in a more casual way. Consequently, "I like you" is a more common way of expressing affection in Chinese; it is more playful and less serious. This is also true in Japanese . The Chinese are also more likely to say "I love you" in English or other foreign languages than they would in their mother tongue.**

 **Persian**

 **Rumi, Hafiz and Sa'di are icons of the passion and love that the Persian culture and language present. The Persian word for love is eshgh, derived from the Arabic ishq, however is considered by most to be too stalwart a term for interpersonal love and is more commonly substituted for 'doost dashtan' . In the Persian culture, everything is encompassed by love and all is for love, starting from loving friends and family, husbands and wives, and eventually reaching the divine love that is the ultimate goal in life . Over seven centuries ago, Sa'di wrote:**

 **Japanese**

 **The Japanese language uses three words to convey the English equivalent of "love". Because "love" covers a wide range of emotions and behavioral phenomena, there are nuances distinguishing the three terms. The term, which is often associated with maternal love**

 **There are several Greek words for "love" that are regularly referred to in Christian circles.**

 **Agape: In the New Testament, agapē is charitable, selfless, altruistic, and unconditional. It is parental love, seen as creating goodness in the world; it is the way God is seen to love humanity, and it is seen as the kind of love that Christians aspire to have for one another.**

 **Christian theologians see God as the source of love, which is mirrored in humans and their own loving relationships. Influential Christian theologian C.S. Lewis wrote a book called The Four Loves. Benedict XVI wrote his first encyclical on "God is love". He said that a human being, created in the image of God, who is love, is able to practice love; to give himself to God and others and by receiving and experiencing God's love in contemplation . This life of love, according to him, is the life of the saints such as Teresa of Calcutta and the Blessed Virgin Mary and is the direction Christians take when they believe that God loves them.**

 **In the condition of separation, there is an acute yearning for being with the beloved and in the condition of union there is supreme happiness and nectarean. Gaudiya Vaishnavas consider that Krishna-prema is not fire but that it still burns away one's material desires. They consider that Kṛṣṇa-prema is not a weapon, but it still pierces the heart. It is not water, but it washes away everything—one's pride, religious rules, and one's shyness. Krishna-prema is considered to make one drown in the ocean of transcendental ecstasy and pleasure. The love of Radha, a cowherd girl, for Krishna is often cited as the supreme example of love for Godhead by Gaudiya Vaishnavas. Radha is considered to be the internal potency of Krishna, and is the supreme lover of Godhead. Her example of love is considered to be beyond the understanding of material realm as it surpasses any form of selfish love or lust that is visible in the material world. The reciprocal love between Radha and Krishna is the subject of many poetic compositions in India such as the Gita Govinda and Hari Bhakti Shuddhodhaya.**

 **In the Bhakti tradition within Hinduism, it is believed that execution of devotional service to God leads to the development of Love for God, and as love for God increases in the heart, the more one becomes free from material contamination . Being perfectly in love with God or Krishna makes one perfectly free from material contamination. and this is the ultimate way of salvation or liberation. In this tradition, salvation or liberation is considered inferior to love, and just an incidental by-product. Being absorbed in Love for God is considered to be the perfection of life.**

 **Political views**

 **Free love**

 **The term free love has been used to describe a social movement that rejects marriage, which is seen as a form of social bondage. The Free Love movement's initial goal was to separate the state from sexual matters such as marriage, birth control, and adultery. It claimed that such issues were the concern of the people involved, and no one else.**

 **Many people in the early 19th century believed that marriage was an important aspect of life to "fulfill earthly human happiness." Middle-class Americans wanted the home to be a place of stability in an uncertain world. This mentality created a vision of strongly defined gender roles, which provoked the advancement of the free love movement as a contrast.**

 **The term "sex radical" is also used interchangeably with the term "free lover", and was the preferred term by advocates because of the negative connotations of "free love". By whatever name, advocates had two strong beliefs: opposition to the idea of forceful sexual activity in a relationship and advocacy for a woman to use her body in any way that she pleases. These are also beliefs of Feminism.**

 **Philosophical views**

 **The philosophy of love is a field of social philosophy and ethics that attempts to explain the nature of love. The philosophical investigation of love includes the tasks of distinguishing between the various kinds of personal love, asking if and how love is or can be justified, asking what the value of love is, and what impact love has on the autonomy of both the lover and the beloved.**

 **Many different theories attempt to explain the nature and function of love. Explaining love to a hypothetical person who had not himself or herself experienced love or being loved would be very difficult because to such a person love would appear to be quite strange if not outright irrational behavior. Among the prevailing types of theories that attempt to account for the existence of love are: psychological theories, the vast majority of which consider love to be very healthy behavior; evolutionary theories which hold that love is part of the process of natural selection; spiritual theories which may, for instance consider love to be a gift from a god; and theories that consider love to be an unexplainable mystery, very much like a mystical experience.**

 **There were many attempts to find the equation of love. One such attempt was by Christian Rudder, a mathematician and co-founder of online dating website OKCupid, one of the largest online dating site. The mathematical approach was through the collection of large data from the dating site. Another interesting equation of love is found by in the philosophical blog 'In the Quest of Truth'. Love is defined as a measure of selfless give and take, and the author attempted to draw a graph that shows the equation of love.**

 **See also**

 **Love at first sight**

 **References**

 **Sources**

 **Further reading**

 **External links**

 **The American Civil War**

 **The American Civil War, widely known in the United States as simply the Civil War as well as other sectional names, was a civil war fought from 1861 to 1865 to determine the survival of the Union or independence for the Confederacy. Among the 34 states in January 1861, seven Southern slave states individually declared their secession from the United States and formed the Confederate States of America. The Confederacy, often simply called the South, grew to include eleven states, and although they claimed thirteen states and additional western territories, the Confederacy was never diplomatically recognized by any foreign country. The states that remained loyal and did not declare secession were known as the Union or the North. The war had its origin in the fractious issue of slavery, especially the extension of slavery into the western territories. After four years of combat, which left over 600,000 Union and Confederate soldiers dead and destroyed much of the South's infrastructure, the Confederacy collapsed and slavery was abolished. Then began the Reconstruction and the processes of restoring national unity and guaranteeing civil rights to the freed slaves.**

 **In the 1860 presidential election, Republicans, led by Abraham Lincoln, supported banning slavery in all the U.S. territories, something the Southern states viewed as a violation of their constitutional rights and as being part of a plan to eventually abolish slavery. The Republican Party, dominant in the North, secured a majority of the electoral votes, and Lincoln was elected the first Republican president, but before his inauguration on March 4, 1861, seven slave states with cotton-based economies formed the Confederacy. The first six to secede had the highest proportions of slaves in their populations, a total of 48.8 percent for the six. Outgoing Democratic President James Buchanan and the incoming Republicans rejected secession as illegal. Lincoln's inaugural address declared his administration would not initiate civil war. Eight remaining slave states continued to reject calls for secession. Confederate forces seized numerous federal forts within territory claimed by the Confederacy. Efforts at compromise failed, and both sides prepared for war. The Confederates assumed that European countries were so dependent on "King Cotton" that they would intervene; none did and none recognized the new Confederate States of America.**

 **Hostilities began on April 12, 1861, when Confederate forces fired upon Fort Sumter. While in the Western Theater the Union made significant permanent gains, in the Eastern Theater, battle was inconclusive in 1861–62. The autumn 1862 Confederate campaigns into Maryland and Kentucky failed, dissuading British intervention. Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, which made ending slavery a war goal.**

 **Causes of secession**

 **The causes of the Civil War were complex and have been controversial since the war began. James C. Bradford wrote that the issue has been further complicated by historical revisionists, who have tried to offer a variety of reasons for the war. Slavery was the central source of escalating political tension in the 1850s. The Republican Party was determined to prevent any spread of slavery, and many Southern leaders had threatened secession if the Republican candidate, Lincoln, won the 1860 election. After Lincoln won without carrying a single Southern state, many Southern whites felt that disunion had become their only option, because they thought that they were losing representation, which would hamper their ability to promote pro-slavery acts and policies.**

 **Root causes**

 **Slavery**

 **Contemporary actors, the Union and Confederate leadership and fighting soldiers on both sides believed that slavery caused the Civil War. Union men mainly believed the war was to emancipate the slaves. Confederates fought to protect southern society, and slavery as an integral part of it. From the anti-slavery perspective, the issue was primarily about whether the system of slavery was an anachronistic evil that was incompatible with Republicanism in the United States. The strategy of the anti-slavery forces was containment — to stop the expansion and thus put slavery on a path to gradual extinction. The slave-holding interests in the South denounced this strategy as infringing upon their Constitutional rights. Southern whites believed that the emancipation of slaves would destroy the South's economy because of the alleged laziness of blacks under free labor.**

 **Slavery was illegal in the North. It was fading in the border states and in Southern cities, but was expanding in the highly profitable cotton districts of the South and Southwest. Subsequent writers on the American Civil War looked to several factors explaining the geographic divide, including sectionalism, protectionism and state's rights.**

 **Sectionalism**

 **Sectionalism refers to the different economies, social structure, customs and political values of the North and South. Pamphelteers North and South rarely mentioned the tariff, and when some did, for instance, Matthew Fontaine Maury and John Lothrop Motley, they were generally writing for a foreign audience.**

 **States rights**

 **The South argued that each state had the right to secede–leave the Union–at any time, that the Constitution was a "compact" or agreement among the states. Northerners rejected that notion as opposed to the will of the Founding Fathers who said they were setting up a perpetual union.**

 **Senator Stephen A. Douglas proclaimed the doctrine of territorial or "popular" sovereignty – which declared that the settlers in a territory had the same rights as states in the Union to establish or disestablish slavery as a purely local matter. The Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 legislated this doctrine. In Kansas Territory, years of pro and anti-slavery violence and political conflict erupted; the congressional House of Representatives voted to admit Kansas as a free state in early 1860, but its admission in the Senate was delayed until January 1861, after the 1860 elections when southern senators began to leave.**

 **The fourth theory was advocated by Mississippi Senator Jefferson Davis, one of state sovereignty, also known as the "Calhoun doctrine", named after the South Carolinian political theorist and statesman John C. Calhoun. Rejecting the arguments for federal authority or self-government, state sovereignty would empower states to promote the expansion of slavery as part of the Federal Union under the U.S. Constitution. "States' rights" was an ideology formulated and applied as a means of advancing slave state interests through federal authority. As historian Thomas L. Krannawitter points out, the "Southern demand for federal slave protection represented a demand for an unprecedented expansion of federal power." These four doctrines comprised the major ideologies presented to the American public on the matters of slavery, the territories and the U.S. Constitution prior to the 1860 presidential election.**

 **National elections**

 **Beginning in the American Revolution and accelerating after the War of 1812, the people of the United States grew in their sense of country as an important example to the world of a national republic of political liberty and personal rights. Previous regional independence movements such as the Greek revolt in the Ottoman Empire, division and redivision in the Latin American political map, and the British-French Crimean triumph leading to an interest in redrawing Europe along cultural differences, all conspired to make for a time of upheaval and uncertainty about the basis of the nation-state. In the world of 19th century self-made Americans, growing in prosperity, population and expanding westward, "freedom" could mean personal liberty or property rights. The unresolved difference would cause failure—first in their political institutions, then in their civil life together.**

 **Nationalism and honor**

 **Nationalism was a powerful force in the early 19th century, with famous spokesmen such as Andrew Jackson and Daniel Webster. While practically all Northerners supported the Union, Southerners were split between those loyal to the entire United States and those loyal primarily to the southern region and then the Confederacy. C. Vann Woodward said of the latter group,**

 **Perceived insults to Southern collective honor included the enormous popularity of Uncle Tom's Cabin However, at least four states – South Carolina, Mississippi, Georgia, and Texas – also passed lengthy and detailed explanations of their causes for secession, all of which laid the blame squarely on the movement to abolish slavery and that movement's influence over the politics of the northern states. The southern states believed slaveholding was a constitutional right because of the Fugitive slave clause of the Constitution.**

 **These states agreed to form a new federal government, the Confederate States of America, on February 4, 1861. They took control of federal forts and other properties within their boundaries with little resistance from outgoing President James Buchanan, whose term ended on March 4, 1861. Buchanan said that the Dred Scott decision was proof that the South had no reason for secession, and that the Union "... was intended to be perpetual," but that, "The power by force of arms to compel a State to remain in the Union," was not among the "... enumerated powers granted to Congress." the National Banking Act and the authorization of United States Notes by the Legal Tender Act of 1862. The Revenue Act of 1861 introduced the income tax to help finance the war.**

 **In December 1860 the Crittenden Compromise was proposed to re-establish the Missouri Compromise line by constitutionally banning slavery in territories to the north of the line while guaranteeing it to the south. The adoption of this compromise likely would have prevented the secession of every southern state apart from South Carolina, but Lincoln and the Republicans rejected it. It was then proposed to hold a national referendum on the compromise. The Republicans again rejected the idea, although a majority of both Northerners and Southerners would have voted in favor of it. A pre-war February Peace Conference of 1861 met in Washington, proposing a solution similar to that of the Crittenden compromise, it was rejected by Congress. The Republicans proposed an alternative compromise to not interfere with slavery where it existed but the South regarded it as insufficient. Nonetheless, the remaining eight slave states rejected pleas to join the Confederacy following a two-to-one no-vote in Virginia's First Secessionist Convention on April 4, 1861.**

 **On March 4, 1861, Abraham Lincoln was sworn in as President. In his inaugural address, he argued that the Constitution was a more perfect union than the earlier Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union, that it was a binding contract, and called any secession "legally void".**

 **However, much of the North's attitude was based on the false belief that only a minority of Southerners were actually in favor of secession and that there were large numbers of southern Unionists that could be counted on. Had Northerners realized that most Southerners really did favor secession, they might have hesitated at attempting the enormous task of conquering a united South.**

 **Lincoln called on all the states to send forces to recapture the fort and other federal properties. He cited presidential powers given by the Militia Acts of 1792. With the scale of the rebellion apparently small so far, Lincoln called for only 75,000 volunteers for 90 days. The governor of Massachusetts had state regiments on trains headed south the next day. In western Missouri, local secessionists seized Liberty Arsenal. On May 3, 1861, Lincoln called for an additional 42,000 volunteers for a period of three years. Lincoln responded by establishing martial law, and unilaterally suspending habeas corpus, in Maryland, along with sending in militia units from the North. Lincoln rapidly took control of Maryland and the District of Columbia, by seizing many prominent figures, including arresting 1/3 of the members of the Maryland General Assembly on the day it reconvened. All were held without trial, ignoring a ruling by the Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court Roger Taney, a Maryland native, that only Congress could suspend habeas corpus, . Indeed, federal troops imprisoned a prominent Baltimore newspaper editor, Frank Key Howard, Francis Scott Key's grandson, after he criticized Lincoln in an editorial for ignoring the Supreme Court Chief Justice's ruling.**

 **In Missouri, an elected convention on secession voted decisively to remain within the Union. When pro-Confederate Governor Claiborne F. Jackson called out the state militia, it was attacked by federal forces under General Nathaniel Lyon, who chased the governor and the rest of the State Guard to the southwestern corner of the state. . In the resulting vacuum, the convention on secession reconvened and took power as the Unionist provisional government of Missouri. The inclusion of 24 secessionist counties**

 **Mobilization**

 **As the first seven states began organizing a Confederacy in Montgomery, the entire U.S. army numbered 16,000. However, Northern governors had begun to mobilize their militias. The Confederate Congress authorized the new nation up to 100,000 troops sent by governors as early as February. By May, Jefferson Davis was pushing for 100,000 men under arms for one year or the duration, and that was answered in kind by the U.S. Congress.**

 **In the first year of the war, both sides had far more volunteers than they could effectively train and equip. After the initial enthusiasm faded, reliance on the cohort of young men who came of age every year and wanted to join was not enough. Both sides used a draft law—conscription—as a device to encourage or force volunteering; relatively few were actually drafted and served. The Confederacy passed a draft law in April 1862 for young men aged 18 to 35; overseers of slaves, government officials, and clergymen were exempt.**

 **When the Emancipation Proclamation went into effect in January 1863, ex-slaves were energetically recruited by the states, and used to meet the state quotas. States and local communities offered higher and higher cash bonuses for white volunteers. Congress tightened the law in March 1863. Men selected in the draft could provide substitutes or, until mid-1864, pay commutation money. Many eligibles pooled their money to cover the cost of anyone drafted. Families used the substitute provision to select which man should go into the army and which should stay home. There was much evasion and overt resistance to the draft, especially in Catholic areas. The great draft riot in New York City in July 1863 involved Irish immigrants who had been signed up as citizens to swell the vote of the city's Democratic political machine, not realizing it made them liable for the draft. At least 100,000 Southerners deserted, or about 10 percent. In the South, many men deserted temporarily to take care of their distressed families, then returned to their units. In the North, "bounty jumpers" enlisted to get the generous bonus, deserted, then went back to a second recruiting station under a different name to sign up again for a second bonus; 141 were caught and executed. The system of exchanges collapsed in 1863 when the Confederacy refused to exchange black prisoners. After that, about 56,000 of the 409,000 POWs died in prisons during the war, accounting for nearly 10 percent of the conflict's fatalities.**

 **Naval war**

 **The small U.S. Navy of 1861 was rapidly enlarged to 6,000 officers and 45,000 men in 1865, with 671 vessels, having a tonnage of 510,396. Its mission was to blockade Confederate ports, take control of the river system, defend against Confederate raiders on the high seas, and be ready for a possible war with the British Royal Navy. Meanwhile, the main riverine war was fought in the West, where a series of major rivers gave access to the Confederate heartland, if the U.S. Navy could take control. In the East, the Navy supplied and moved army forces about, and occasionally shelled Confederate installations.**

 **Union blockade**

 **By early 1861, General Winfield Scott had devised the Anaconda Plan to win the war with as little bloodshed as possible. Scott argued that a Union blockade of the main ports would weaken the Confederate economy. Lincoln adopted parts of the plan, but he overruled Scott's caution about 90-day volunteers. Public opinion, however, demanded an immediate attack by the army to capture Richmond.**

 **In April 1861, Lincoln announced the Union blockade of all Southern ports; commercial ships could not get insurance and regular traffic ended. The South blundered in embargoing cotton exports in 1861 before the blockade was effective; by the time they realized the mistake, it was too late. "King Cotton" was dead, as the South could export less than 10 percent of its cotton. The blockade shut down the ten Confederate seaports with railheads that moved almost all the cotton, especially New Orleans, Mobile, and Charleston. By June 1861, warships were stationed off the principal Southern ports, and a year later nearly 300 ships were in service.**

 **Modern navy evolves**

 **The Civil War occurred during the early stages of the industrial revolution and subsequently many naval innovations emerged during this time, most notably the advent of the ironclad warship. It began when the Confederacy, knowing they had to meet or match the Union's naval superiority, responded to the Union blockade by building or converting more than 130 vessels, including twenty-six ironclads and floating batteries. Only half of these saw active service. Many were equipped with ram bows, creating "ram fever" among Union squadrons wherever they threatened. But in the face of overwhelming Union superiority and the Union's own ironclad warships, they were unsuccessful.**

 **The Confederacy experimented with a submarine, which did not work well, and with building an ironclad ship, the CSS Virginia, which was based on rebuilding a sunken Union ship, the Merrimack. On its first foray on March 8, 1862, the Virginia decimated the Union's wooden fleet, but the next day the first Union ironclad, the USS Monitor, arrived to challenge it. The Battle of the Ironclads was a draw, but it marks the worldwide transition to ironclad warships.**

 **The Confederacy lost the Virginia when the ship was scuttled to prevent capture, and the Union built many copies of the Monitor. Lacking the technology to build effective warships, the Confederacy attempted to obtain warships from Britain.**

 **Blockade runners**

 **British investors built small, fast, steam-driven blockade runners that traded arms and luxuries brought in from Britain through Bermuda, Cuba, and the Bahamas in return for high-priced cotton. The ships were so small that only a small amount of cotton went out. When the Union Navy seized a blockade runner, the ship and cargo were condemned as a Prize of war and sold, with the proceeds given to the Navy sailors; the captured crewmen were mostly British and they were simply released. The Southern economy nearly collapsed during the war. There were multiple reasons for this: the severe deterioration of food supplies, especially in cities, the failure of Southern railroads, the loss of control of the main rivers, foraging by Northern armies, and the seizure of animals and crops by Confederate armies. Most historians agree that the blockade was a major factor in ruining the Confederate economy, however, Wise argues that the blockade runners provided just enough of a lifeline to allow Lee to continue fighting for additional months, thanks to fresh supplies of 400,000 rifles, lead, blankets, and boots that the homefront economy could no longer supply.**

 **Economic impact**

 **Surdam argues that the blockade was a powerful weapon that eventually ruined the Southern economy, at the cost of few lives in combat. Practically, the entire Confederate cotton crop was useless, costing the Confederacy its main source of income. Critical imports were scarce and the coastal trade was largely ended as well. The measure of the blockade's success was not the few ships that slipped through, but the thousands that never tried it. Merchant ships owned in Europe could not get insurance and were too slow to evade the blockade; they simply stopped calling at Confederate ports.**

 **To fight an offensive war, the Confederacy purchased ships from Britain, converted them to warships, and raided American merchant ships in the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. Insurance rates skyrocketed and the American flag virtually disappeared from international waters. However, the same ships were reflagged with European flags and continued unmolested. After the war, the U.S. demanded that Britain pay for the damage done, and Britain paid the U.S. $15 million in 1871.**

 **Rivers**

 **The 1862 Union strategy called for simultaneous advances along four axes. McClellan would lead the main thrust in Virginia towards Richmond. Ohio forces were to advance through Kentucky into Tennessee, the Missouri Department would drive south along the Mississippi River, and the westernmost attack would originate from Kansas.**

 **Ulysses Grant used river transport and Andrew Foote's gunboats of the Western Flotilla to threaten the Confederacy's "Gibraltar of the West" at Columbus, Kentucky. Grant was rebuffed at Belmont, but cut off Columbus. The Confederates, lacking their own gunboats, were forced to retreat and the Union took control of western Kentucky in March 1862.**

 **In addition to ocean-going warships coming up the Mississippi, the Union Navy used timberclads, tinclads, and armored gunboats. Shipyards at Cairo, Illinois, and St. Louis built new boats or modified steamboats for action. They took control of the Red, Tennessee, Cumberland, Mississippi, and Ohio rivers after victories at Fort Henry and Fort Donelson, and supplied Grant's forces as he moved into Tennessee. At Shiloh, in Tennessee in April 1862, the Confederates made a surprise attack that pushed Union forces against the river as night fell. Overnight, the Navy landed additional reinforcements, and Grant counter-attacked. Grant and the Union won a decisive victory – the first battle with the high casualty rates that would repeat over and over. Memphis fell to Union forces and became a key base for further advances south along the Mississippi River. In April 1862, U.S. Naval forces under Farragut ran past Confederate defenses south of New Orleans. Confederates abandoned the city, which gave the Union a critical anchor in the deep South.**

 **Naval forces assisted Grant in his long, complex campaign that resulted in the surrender of Vicksburg in July 1863, and full Union control of the Mississippi soon after.**

 **Eastern theater**

 **Because of the fierce resistance of a few initial Confederate forces at Manassas, Virginia, in July 1861, a march by Union troops under the command of Maj. Gen. Irvin McDowell on the Confederate forces there was halted in the First Battle of Bull Run, or First Manassas. McDowell's troops were forced back to Washington, D.C., by the Confederates under the command of Generals Joseph E. Johnston and P. G. T. Beauregard. It was in this battle that Confederate General Thomas Jackson received the nickname of "Stonewall" because he stood like a stone wall against Union troops.**

 **Alarmed at the loss, and in an attempt to prevent more slave states from leaving the Union, the U.S. Congress passed the Crittenden–Johnson Resolution on July 25 of that year, which stated that the war was being fought to preserve the Union and not to end slavery.**

 **Maj. Gen. George B. McClellan took command of the Union Army of the Potomac on July 26, and the war began in earnest in 1862. Upon the strong urging of President Lincoln to begin offensive operations, McClellan attacked Virginia in the spring of 1862 by way of the peninsula between the York River and James River, southeast of Richmond. Although McClellan's army reached the gates of Richmond in the Peninsula Campaign, Roving Confederate bands such as Quantrill's Raiders terrorized the countryside, striking both military installations and civilian settlements. The "Sons of Liberty" and "Order of the American Knights" attacked pro-Union people, elected officeholders, and unarmed uniformed soldiers. These partisans could not be entirely driven out of the state of Missouri until an entire regular Union infantry division was engaged.**

 **By 1864, these violent activities harmed the nationwide anti-war movement organizing against the re-election of Lincoln. Missouri not only stayed in the Union, Lincoln took 70 percent of the vote for re-election.**

 **Numerous small-scale military actions south and west of Missouri sought to control Indian Territory and New Mexico Territory for the Union. The Union repulsed Confederate incursions into New Mexico in 1862, and the exiled Arizona government withdrew into Texas. In the Indian Territory, civil war broke out within tribes. About 12,000 Indian warriors fought for the Confederacy, and smaller numbers for the Union. The most prominent Cherokee was Brigadier General Stand Watie, the last Confederate general to surrender.**

 **After the fall of Vicksburg in July 1863, General Kirby Smith in Texas was informed by Jefferson Davis that he could expect no further help from east of the Mississippi River. Although he lacked resources to beat Union armies, he built up a formidable arsenal at Tyler, along with his own Kirby Smithdom economy, a virtual "independent fiefdom" in Texas, including railroad construction and international smuggling. The Union in turn did not directly engage him. Its 1864 Red River Campaign to take Shreveport, Louisiana was a failure and Texas remained in Confederate hands throughout the war.**

 **End of war**

 **Conquest of Virginia**

 **At the beginning of 1864, Lincoln made Grant commander of all Union armies. Grant made his headquarters with the Army of the Potomac, and put Maj. Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman in command of most of the western armies. Grant understood the concept of total war and believed, along with Lincoln and Sherman, that only the utter defeat of Confederate forces and their economic base would end the war. Grant devised a coordinated strategy that would strike at the entire Confederacy from multiple directions. Generals George Meade and Benjamin Butler were ordered to move against Lee near Richmond, General Franz Sigel were to attack the Shenandoah Valley, General Sherman was to capture Atlanta and march to the sea, Generals George Crook and William W. Averell were to operate against railroad supply lines in West Virginia, and Maj. Gen. Nathaniel P. Banks was to capture Mobile, Alabama.**

 **Grant's army set out on the Overland Campaign with the goal of drawing Lee into a defense of Richmond, where they would attempt to pin down and destroy the Confederate army. The Union army first attempted to maneuver past Lee and fought several battles, notably at the Wilderness, Spotsylvania, and Cold Harbor. These battles resulted in heavy losses on both sides, and forced Lee's Confederates to fall back repeatedly. An attempt to outflank Lee from the south failed under Butler, who was trapped inside the Bermuda Hundred river bend. Each battle resulted in setbacks for the Union that mirrored what they had suffered under prior generals, though unlike those prior generals, Grant fought on rather than retreat. Grant was tenacious and kept pressing Lee's Army of Northern Virginia back to Richmond. While Lee was preparing for an attack on Richmond, Grant unexpectedly turned south to cross the James River and began the protracted Siege of Petersburg, where the two armies engaged in trench warfare for over nine months.**

 **Grant finally found a commander, General Philip Sheridan, aggressive enough to prevail in the Valley Campaigns of 1864. Sheridan was initially repelled at the Battle of New Market by former U.S. Vice President and Confederate Gen. John C. Breckinridge. The Battle of New Market was the Confederacy's last major victory of the war. After redoubling his efforts, Sheridan defeated Maj. Gen. Jubal A. Early in a series of battles, including a final decisive defeat at the Battle of Cedar Creek. Sheridan then proceeded to destroy the agricultural base of the Shenandoah Valley, a strategy similar to the tactics Sherman later employed in Georgia.**

 **Meanwhile, Sherman maneuvered from Chattanooga to Atlanta, defeating Confederate Generals Joseph E. Johnston and John Bell Hood along the way. The fall of Atlanta on September 2, 1864, guaranteed the reelection of Lincoln as president. Hood left the Atlanta area to swing around and menace Sherman's supply lines and invade Tennessee in the Franklin-Nashville Campaign. Union Maj. Gen. John Schofield defeated Hood at the Battle of Franklin, and George H. Thomas dealt Hood a massive defeat at the Battle of Nashville, effectively destroying Hood's army.**

 **Leaving Atlanta, and his base of supplies, Sherman's army marched with an unknown destination, laying waste to about 20 percent of the farms in Georgia in his "March to the Sea". He reached the Atlantic Ocean at Savannah, Georgia in December 1864. Sherman's army was followed by thousands of freed slaves; there were no major battles along the March. Sherman turned north through South Carolina and North Carolina to approach the Confederate Virginia lines from the south, increasing the pressure on Lee's army.**

 **Lee's army, thinned by desertion and casualties, was now much smaller than Grant's. One last Confederate attempt to break the Union hold on Petersburg failed at the decisive Battle of Five Forks on April 1. This meant that the Union now controlled the entire perimeter surrounding Richmond-Petersburg, completely cutting it off from the Confederacy. Realizing that the capital was now lost, Lee decided to evacuate his army. The Confederate capital fell to the Union XXV Corps, composed of black troops. The remaining Confederate units fled west and after a defeat at Sayler's Creek.**

 **Confederacy surrenders**

 **Initially, Lee did not intend to surrender, but planned to regroup at the village of Appomattox Court House, where supplies were to be waiting, and then continue the war. Grant chased Lee and got in front of him, so that when Lee's army reached Appomattox Court House, they were surrounded. After an initial battle, Lee decided that the fight was now hopeless, and surrendered his Army of Northern Virginia on April 9, 1865, at the McLean House.**

 **Diplomacy**

 **Though the Confederacy hoped that Britain and France would join them against the Union, this was never likely, and so they instead tried to bring Britain and France in as mediators. The Union, under Lincoln and Secretary of State William H. Seward worked to block this, and threatened war if any country officially recognized the existence of the Confederate States of America. In 1861, Southerners voluntarily embargoed cotton shipments, hoping to start an economic depression in Europe that would force Britain to enter the war to get cotton, but this did not work. Worse, Europe developed other cotton suppliers, which they found superior, hindering the South's recovery after the war.**

 **Cotton diplomacy proved a failure as Europe had a surplus of cotton, while the 1860–62 crop failures in Europe made the North's grain exports of critical importance. It also helped to turn European opinion further away from the Confederacy. It was said that "King Corn was more powerful than King Cotton", as U.S. grain went from a quarter of the British import trade to almost half. When Britain did face a cotton shortage, it was temporary, being replaced by increased cultivation in Egypt and India. Meanwhile, the war created employment for arms makers, ironworkers, and British ships to transport weapons.**

 **U.S. minister to Britain Charles Francis Adams proved particularly adept and convinced Britain not to boldly challenge the blockade. The Confederacy purchased several warships from commercial shipbuilders in Britain . The most famous, the CSS Alabama, did considerable damage and led to serious postwar disputes. However, public opinion against slavery created a political liability for European politicians, especially in Britain . Marxist historian Armstead Robinson agrees, pointing to a class conflict in the Confederates army between the slave owners and the larger number of non-owners. He argues that the non-owner soldiers grew embittered about fighting to preserve slavery, and fought less enthusiastically. He attributes the major Confederate defeats in 1863 at Vicksburg and Missionary Ridge to this class conflict. However, most historians reject the argument. James M. McPherson, after reading thousands of letters written by Confederate soldiers, found strong patriotism that continued to the end; they truly believed they were fighting for freedom and liberty. Even as the Confederacy was visibly collapsing in 1864–65, he says most Confederate soldiers were fighting hard. Historian Gary Gallagher cites General Sherman who in early 1864 commented, "The devils seem to have a determination that cannot but be admired." Despite their loss of slaves and wealth, with starvation looming, Sherman continued, "yet I see no sign of let up – some few deserters – plenty tired of war, but the masses determined to fight it out."**

 **Also important were Lincoln's eloquence in rationalizing the national purpose and his skill in keeping the border states committed to the Union cause. The Emancipation Proclamation was an effective use of the President's war powers. The Union victory energized popular democratic forces. A Confederate victory, on the other hand, would have meant a new birth of slavery, not freedom. Historian Fergus Bordewich, following Doyle, argues that:**

 **Costs**

 **The war produced about 1,030,000 casualties, including about 620,000 soldier deaths—two-thirds by disease, and 50,000 civilians. The war accounted for roughly as many American deaths as all American deaths in other U.S. wars combined.**

 **Based on 1860 census figures, 8 percent of all white males aged 13 to 43 died in the war, including 6 percent in the North and 18 percent in the South.**

 **Union army dead, amounting to 15 percent of the over two million who served, was broken down as follows: Notably, their mortality rate was significantly higher than white soldiers:**

 **Incomplete Confederate records list 74,524 killed and died of wounds and 59,292 died of disease. Including Confederate estimates of battle losses where no records exist would bring the Confederate death toll to 94,000 killed and died of wounds.**

 **The wealth amassed in slaves and slavery for the Confederacy's 3.5 million blacks effectively ended when Union armies arrived; they were nearly all freed by the Emancipation Proclamation. Slaves in the border states and those located in some former Confederate territory occupied before the Emancipation Proclamation were freed by state action or by the Thirteenth Amendment.**

 **The war destroyed much of the wealth that had existed in the South. All accumulated investment Confederate bonds was forfeit; most banks and railroads were bankrupt. Income per person in the South dropped to less than 40 percent of that of the North, a condition that lasted until well into the 20th century. Southern influence in the U.S. federal government, previously considerable, was greatly diminished until the latter half of the 20th century. By warning that free blacks would flood the North, Democrats made gains in the 1862 elections, but they did not gain control of Congress. The Republicans' counterargument that slavery was the mainstay of the enemy steadily gained support, with the Democrats losing decisively in the 1863 elections in the northern state of Ohio when they tried to resurrect anti-black sentiment.**

 **Emancipation Proclamation**

 **The Emancipation Proclamation enabled African-Americans, both free blacks and escaped slaves, to join the Union Army. About 190,000 volunteered, further enhancing the numerical advantage the Union armies enjoyed over the Confederates, who did not dare emulate the equivalent manpower source for fear of fundamentally undermining the legitimacy of slavery.**

 **During the Civil War, sentiment concerning slaves, enslavement and emancipation in the United States was divided. In 1861, Lincoln worried that premature attempts at emancipation would mean the loss of the border states, and that "to lose Kentucky is nearly the same as to lose the whole game." Copperheads and some War Democrats opposed emancipation, although the latter eventually accepted it as part of total war needed to save the Union.**

 **At first, Lincoln reversed attempts at emancipation by Secretary of War Simon Cameron and Generals John C. Frémont and David Hunter to keep the loyalty of the border states and the War Democrats. Lincoln warned the border states that a more radical type of emancipation would happen if his gradual plan based on compensated emancipation and voluntary colonization was rejected. But only the District of Columbia accepted Lincoln's gradual plan, which was enacted by Congress. When Lincoln told his cabinet about his proposed emancipation proclamation, Seward advised Lincoln to wait for a victory before issuing it, as to do otherwise would seem like "our last shriek on the retreat". Lincoln laid the groundwork for public support in an open letter published letter to abolitionist Horace Greeley's newspaper.**

 **In September 1862, the Battle of Antietam provided this opportunity, and the subsequent War Governors' Conference added support for the proclamation. Lincoln issued his preliminary Emancipation Proclamation on September 22, 1862, and his final Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863. In his letter to Albert G. Hodges, Lincoln explained his belief that "If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong ... And yet I have never understood that the Presidency conferred upon me an unrestricted right to act officially upon this judgment and feeling ... I claim not to have controlled events, but confess plainly that events have controlled me."**

 **Lincoln's moderate approach succeeded in inducing border states, War Democrats and emancipated slaves to fight for the Union. The Union-controlled border states and Union-controlled regions around New Orleans, Norfolk and elsewhere, were not covered by the Emancipation Proclamation. All abolished slavery on their own, except Kentucky and Delaware.**

 **Since the Emancipation Proclamation was based on the President's war powers, it only included territory held by Confederates at the time. However, the Proclamation became a symbol of the Union's growing commitment to add emancipation to the Union's definition of liberty. The Emancipation Proclamation greatly reduced the Confederacy's hope of getting aid from Britain or France. By late 1864, Lincoln was playing a leading role in getting Congress to vote for the Thirteenth Amendment, which made emancipation universal and permanent.**

 **Texas v. White**

 **In Texas v. White, the United States Supreme Court ruled that Texas had remained a state ever since it first joined the Union, despite claims that it joined the Confederate States of America; the court further held that the Constitution did not permit states to unilaterally secede from the United States, and that the ordinances of secession, and all the acts of the legislatures within seceding states intended to give effect to such ordinances, were "absolutely null", under the constitution.**

 **Reconstruction**

 **Reconstruction began during the war, with the Emancipation Proclamation of January 1, 1863 and continued until 1877. It comprised multiple complex methods to resolve the outstanding issues of the war's aftermath, the most important of which were the three "Reconstruction Amendments" to the Constitution, which remain in effect to the present time: the 13th, the 14th and the 15th . From the Union perspective, the goals of Reconstruction were to consolidate the Union victory on the battlefield by reuniting the Union; to guarantee a "republican form of government for the ex-Confederate states; and to permanently end slavery—and prevent semi-slavery status.**

 **President Johnson took a lenient approach and saw the achievement of the main war goals as realized in 1865, when each ex-rebel state repudiated secession and ratified the Thirteenth Amendment. Radical Republicans demanded proof that Confederate nationalism was dead and that the slaves were truly free. They came to the fore after the 1866 elections and undid much of Johnson's work. In 1872 the "Liberal Republicans" argued that the war goals had been achieved and that Reconstruction should end. They ran a presidential ticket in 1872 but were decisively defeated. In 1874, Democrats, primarily Southern, took control of Congress and opposed any more reconstruction. The Compromise of 1877 closed with a national consensus that the Civil War had finally ended. With the withdrawal of federal troops, however, whites retook control of every Southern legislature; the Jim Crow period of disenfranchisement and legal segregation was about to begin.**

 **Memory and historiography**

 **The Civil War is one of the central events in America's collective memory. There are innumerable statues, commemorations, books and archival collections. The memory includes the home front, military affairs, the treatment of soldiers, both living and dead, in the war's aftermath, depictions of the war in literature and art, evaluations of heroes and villains, and considerations of the moral and political lessons of the war. The two important political legacies that flowed from the adoption of the Lost Cause analysis were that it facilitated the reunification of the North and the South, and it excused the "virulent racism" of the 19th century, sacrificing African-American progress to a white man's reunification. But the Lost Cause legacy to history is "a caricature of the truth. This caricature wholly misrepresents and distorts the facts of the matter" in every instance.**

 **Beardian historiography**

 **The interpretation of the Civil War presented by Charles A. Beard and Mary R. Beard in The Rise of American Civilization was highly influential among historians and the general public until the Civil Rights Era of the 1950s and 1960s. The Beards downplayed slavery, abolitionism, and issues of morality. They ignored constitutional issues of states' rights and even ignored American nationalism as the force that finally led to victory in the war. Indeed, the ferocious combat itself was passed over as merely an ephemeral event. Much more important was the calculus of class conflict. The Beards announced that the Civil War was really a:**

 **The Beards themselves abandoned their interpretation by the 1940s and it became defunct among historians in the 1950s, when scholars shifted to an emphasis on slavery. However, Beardian themes still echo among Lost Cause writers.**

 **Civil War commemoration**

 **The American Civil War has been commemorated in many capacities ranging from the reenactment of battles, to statues and memorial halls erected, to films being produced, to stamps and coins with Civil War themes being issued, all of which helped to shape public memory. This varied advent occurred in greater proportions on the 100th and 150th anniversary.**

 **Hollywood's take on the war has been especially influential in shaping public memory, as seen in such film classics as Birth of a Nation, Gone with the Wind, and more recently Lincoln . Ken Burns produced a notable PBS series on television titled The Civil War . It was digitally remastered and re-released in 2015.**

 **In works of culture and art**

 **Literature**

 **"Gone with the Wind"**

 **"An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge"**

 **"Texar's Revenge, or, North Against South"**

 **Cinema**

 **The Birth of a Nation**

 **The General**

 **Gone with the Wind**

 **The Red Badge of Courage**

 **The Horse Soldiers**

 **Shenandoah**

 **The Good, the Bad and the Ugly**

 **Glory**

 **Dances with Wolves**

 **Gettysburg**

 **The Last Outlaw**

 **Cold Mountain**

 **Gods and Generals**

 **North and South**

 **Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter**

 **Lincoln**

 **Django Unchained**

 **12 Years a Slave**

 **See also**

 **General reference**

 **Battles of the American Civil War**

 **Bibliography of the American Civil War**

 **Corps badges of the American Civil War**

 **Costliest Battles of the American Civil War**

 **Naval bibliography of the American Civil War**

 **Origins of the American Civil War**

 **Uniforms of the Confederacy**

 **Uniforms of the Union**

 **Weapons in the American Civil War**

 **Union**

 **United States**

 **Union Army**

 **Union Navy**

 **Confederacy**

 **Confederate States**

 **Confederate Army**

 **Confederate Navy**

 **Ethnic articles**

 **African Americans in the American Civil War**

 **German Americans in the American Civil War**

 **Hispanic Americans in the American Civil War**

 **Irish Americans in the American Civil War**

 **Italian Americans in the American Civil War**

 **Native Americans in the American Civil War**

 **Topical articles**

 **Blockade runners of the American Civil War**

 **Blockade, Union – of the American Civil War**

 **Casualties in the American Civil War**

 **Commemoration of the American Civil War**

 **Commemoration of the American Civil War on postage stamps**

 **Infantry in the American Civil War**

 **Nursing in the American Civil War, Dorothea Dix**

 **Ships captured during the American Civil War**

 **Slaves and the American Civil War**

 **Spies in the American Civil War**

 **National articles**

 **Foreign enlistment in the American Civil War**

 **Britain in the American Civil War**

 **Canada in the American Civil War**

 **Prussia in the American Civil War**

 **References**

 **Notes**

 **Citations**

 **Bibliography**

 **Beringer, Richard E., Archer Jones, and Herman Hattaway, Why the South Lost the Civil War influential analysis of factors; an abridged version is The Elements of Confederate Defeat: Nationalism, War Aims, and Religion**

 **Gara, Larry. 1964. The Fugitive Slave Law: A Double Paradox in Essays on the Civil War and Reconstruction, New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1970.**

 **Murray, Robert Bruce. Legal Cases of the Civil War. ISBN 0-8117-0059-3**

 **Nevins, Allan. Ordeal of the Union, an 8-volume set . the most detailed political, economic and military narrative; by Pulitzer Prize winner**

 **1\. Fruits of Manifest Destiny, 1847–1852; 2. A House Dividing, 1852–1857; 3. Douglas, Buchanan, and Party Chaos, 1857–1859; 4. Prologue to Civil War, 1859–1861; vol. 5–8 have the series title "War for the Union"; 5. The Improvised War, 1861–1862; 6. War Becomes Revolution, 1862–1863; 7. The Organized War, 1863–1864; 8. The Organized War to Victory, 1864–1865**

 **Further reading**

 **Gugliotta, Guy., The New York Times, April 3, 2012, pg. D1, and April 2, 2012 on . Retrieved 2012-04-03 online.**

 **Bibliography of American Civil War naval history**

 **External links**

 **at the National Archives**

 **from the at the Library of Congress**

 **This collection contains digital images of political cartoons, personal papers, pamphlets, maps, paintings and photographs from the Civil War Era held in Special Collections at Gettysburg College.**

 **Washington Post interactive website on the 150th Anniversary of the American Civil War.**

– **An Association of Southeastern Research Libraries portal with links to almost 9,000 digitized Civil War-era items—books, pamphlets, broadsides, letters, maps, personal papers, and manuscripts—held at ASERL member libraries**

– **site with 7,000 pages, including the complete run of Harper's Weekly newspapers from the Civil War**

 **, Cornell University Library**

 **Civil War**


	2. Chapter One

Gay is a term that primarily refers to a homosexual person or the trait of being homosexual. The term was originally used to refer to feelings of being "carefree", "happy", or "bright and showy".

The term's use as a reference to homosexuality may date as early as the late 19th century, but its use gradually increased in the 20th century. In modern English, gay has come to be used as an adjective, and as a noun, referring to the people, especially to gay males, and the practices and cultures associated with homosexuality. By the end of the 20th century, the word gay was recommended by major LGBT groups and style guides to describe people attracted to members of the same sex.

At about the same time, a new, pejorative use became prevalent in some parts of the world. In the Anglosphere, this connotation, among younger speakers, has a meaning ranging from derision to a light-hearted mockery or ridicule . In this use, the word rarely means "homosexual", as it is often used, for example, to refer to an inanimate object or abstract concept of which one disapproves. The extent to which these usages still retain connotations of homosexuality has been debated and harshly criticized.

Gay is also a consonant in Pitman shorthand.

History

Overview

The word gay arrived in English during the 12th century from Old French gai, most likely deriving ultimately from a Germanic source. also illustrates this connotation. It was apparently not until the 20th century that the word began to be used to mean specifically "homosexual", although it had earlier acquired sexual connotations.

Sexualization

The word may have started to acquire associations of immorality as early as the 14th century, but had certainly acquired them by the 17th. or in the title of the book and film The Gay Falcon, which concerns a womanizing detective whose first name is "Gay". The "gaya ciencia" was a Provençal/French/Castilian term for poetry. Similarly, Fred Gilbert and G. H. MacDermott's music hall song of the 1880s, "Charlie Dilke Upset the Milk" – "Master Dilke upset the milk/When taking it home to Chelsea;/ The papers say that Charlie's gay/Rather a wilful wag!" – referred to Sir Charles Dilke's alleged heterosexual impropriety. Well into the mid 20th century a middle-aged bachelor could be described as "gay", indicating that he was unattached and therefore free, without any implication of homosexuality. This usage could apply to women too. The British comic strip Jane, first published in the 1930s, described the adventures of Jane Gay. Far from implying homosexuality, it referred to her free-wheeling lifestyle with plenty of boyfriends .

A passage from Gertrude Stein's Miss Furr & Miss Skeene is possibly the first traceable published use of the word to refer to a homosexual relationship. According to Linda Wagner-Martin the portrait "featured the sly repetition of the word gay, used with sexual intent for one of the first times in linguistic history," and Edmund Wilson agreed. For example:

Bringing Up Baby was the first film to use the word gay in apparent reference to homosexuality. In a scene in which the Cary Grant character's clothes have been sent to the cleaners, he is forced to wear a woman's feather-trimmed robe. When another character asks about his robe, he responds, "Because I just went gay all of a sudden!" Since this was a mainstream film at a time when the use of the word to refer to cross-dressing would still be unfamiliar to most film-goers, the line can also be interpreted to mean "I just decided to do something frivolous."

The word continued to be used with the dominant meaning of "carefree", as evidenced by the title of The Gay Divorcee, a musical film about a heterosexual couple.

Shift to homosexual

By the mid-20th century, gay was well established in reference to hedonistic and uninhibited lifestyles and its antonym straight, which had long had connotations of seriousness, respectability, and conventionality, had now acquired specific connotations of heterosexuality. In the case of gay, other connotations of frivolousness and showiness in dress led to association with camp and effeminacy. This association no doubt helped the gradual narrowing in scope of the term towards its current dominant meaning, which was at first confined to subcultures. Gay was the preferred term since other terms, such as queer, were felt to be derogatory. Homosexual is perceived as excessively clinical, since the sexual orientation now commonly referred to as "homosexuality" was at that time a mental illness diagnosis in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders .

In mid-20th century Britain, where male homosexuality was illegal until the Sexual Offences Act 1967, to openly identify someone as homosexual was considered very offensive and an accusation of serious criminal activity. Additionally, none of the words describing any aspect of homosexuality were considered suitable for polite society. Consequently, a number of euphemisms were used to hint at suspected homosexuality. Examples include "sporty" girls and "artistic" boys, all with the stress deliberately on the otherwise completely innocent adjective.

The sixties marked the transition in the predominant meaning of the word gay from that of "carefree" to the current "homosexual".

In the British comedy-drama film Light Up The Sky! directed by Lewis Gilbert about the antics of a British Army searchlight squad during World War II, there is a scene in the mess hut where the character played by Benny Hill proposes an after dinner toast. He begins, "I'd like to propose..." at which point a fellow diner, played by Sidney Tafler, interjects "Who to?", suggesting a proposal of marriage. The Benny Hill character responds, "Not to you for start, you ain't my type". He then adds in mock doubt, "Oh, I don't know, you're rather gay on the quiet."

By 1963, a new sense of the word gay was known well enough to be used by Albert Ellis in his book The Intelligent Woman's Guide to Man-Hunting. Similarly, Hubert Selby, Jr. in his 1964 novel Last Exit to Brooklyn, could write that a character "took pride in being a homosexual by feeling intellectually and esthetically superior to those who weren't gay..." Later examples of the original meaning of the word being used in popular culture include the theme song to the 1960–1966 animated TV series The Flintstones, whereby viewers are assured that they will "have a gay old time." Similarly, the 1966 Herman's Hermits song "No Milk Today", which became a Top 10 hit in the UK and a Top 40 hit in the U.S., included the lyric "No milk today, it was not always so / The company was gay, we'd turn night into day." In June 1967, the headline of the review of the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band album in the British daily newspaper The Times stated, "The Beatles revive hopes of progress in pop music with their gay new LP". Yet in the same year, The Kinks recorded "David Watts". Ostensibly about schoolboy envy, the song also operated as an in-joke, as related in Jon Savage's "The Kinks: The Official Biography", because the song took its name from a homosexual promoter they'd encountered who'd had romantic designs on songwriter Ray Davies' teenage brother; and the lines "he is so gay and fancy free" attest to the ambiguity of the word's meaning at that time, with the second meaning evident only for those in the know. As late as 1970, the first episode of The Mary Tyler Moore Show has the demonstrably straight Mary Richards' downstairs neighbor, Phyllis, breezily declaiming that Mary is, at age 30, still "young and gay."

There is little doubt that the homosexual sense is a development of the word's traditional meaning, as described above. It has nevertheless been claimed that gay stands for "Good As You", but there is no evidence for this: it is a folk etymology backronym.

Homosexuality

Sexual orientation, identity, behavior

The American Psychological Association defines sexual orientation as "an enduring pattern of emotional, romantic, and/or sexual attractions to men, women, or both sexes," ranging "along a continuum, from exclusive attraction to the other sex to exclusive attraction to the same sex." Sexual orientation can also be "discussed in terms of three categories: heterosexual, gay/lesbian, and bisexual ."

The British gay rights activist Peter Tatchell has argued that the term gay is merely a cultural expression which reflects the current status of homosexuality within a given society, and claiming that "Queer, gay, homosexual ... in the long view, they are all just temporary identities. One day, we will not need them at all."

If a person engages in sexual activity with a partner of the same sex but does not self-identify as gay, terms such as 'closeted', 'discreet', or 'bi-curious' may apply. Conversely, a person may identify as gay without having had sex with a same-sex partner. Possible choices include identifying as gay socially while choosing to be celibate or while anticipating a first homosexual experience. Further, a bisexual person can also identify as "gay" but others might consider gay and bisexual to be mutually exclusive. There are some who are drawn to the same sex but neither engage in sexual activity nor identify as gay; these could have the term asexual applied, even though asexual generally can mean no attraction or involve heterosexual attraction but no sexual activity.

Terminology

Some reject the term homosexual as an identity-label because they find it too clinical-sounding; they believe it is too focused on physical acts rather than romance or attraction, or too reminiscent of the era when homosexuality was considered a mental illness. Conversely, some reject term gay as an identity-label because they perceive the cultural connotations to be undesirable or because of the negative connotations of the slang usage of the word.

Style guides, like the following from the Associated Press, call for gay over homosexual:

Gay community vs. LGBT community

Starting in the mid-1980s in the United States, a conscious effort was under way within what was then only called the gay community, to add the term lesbian to the name of all gay organizations that catered to both male and female homosexuals, and to use the terminology of gay and lesbian, or lesbian/gay when referring to that community. So, organizations like the National Gay Task Force became the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force. For many ardent feminist lesbians, it was also important that the L come first, lest an L following a G become another symbol of male dominance over women, although other women prefer the usage gay woman. In the 1990s, this was followed by another equally concerted push to include the terminology specifically pointing out the inclusion of bisexual, transgender, intersex, and other people, reflecting the intra-community debate as to whether these other sexual minorities were part of the same human rights movement. Most news organizations have formally adopted variations of this use, following the example and preference of the organizations, as reflected in their press releases and public communications.

Descriptor

The term gay can also be used as an adjective to describe things related to homosexual men, or things which are part of the said culture. For example, the term "gay bar" describes the bar which either caters primarily to a homosexual male clientele, or is otherwise part of homosexual male culture.

Using it to describe an object, such as an item of clothing, suggests that it is particularly flamboyant, often on the verge of being gaudy and garish. This usage predates the association of the term with homosexuality, but has acquired different connotations since the modern usage developed.

Use as a noun

The label "gay" was originally used purely as an adjective . The term has also been in use as a noun with the meaning "homosexual man" since the 1970s, as in "gays are opposed to that policy." This usage is common, such as in the case of "LGBT", and in the names of organizations, such as Parents, Families and Friends of Lesbians and Gays and Children Of Lesbians And Gays Everywhere . It is sometimes used as a singular noun, as in "he is a gay". It was also used to comic effect by the Little Britain character Dafydd Thomas.

Generalized pejorative use

When used with a derisive attitude, the word gay is pejorative. While retaining its other meanings, it has also acquired "a widespread current usage" amongst young people as a general term of disparagement.

Parallels in other languages

The concept of a "gay identity" and the use of the term gay may not be used or understood the same way in non-Westernised cultures, since modes of sexuality may differ from those prevalent in the West.

The German equivalent for gay, schwul, which is etymologically derived from schwül, also acquired the pejorative meaning within youth culture.

See also

Anti-LGBT slogans

Deviance

Gay bashing

Gay sexual practices

Gender identity

Gender dysphoria

Hate speech

Heterosexism

Human male sexuality

Human Rights Campaign

Labeling theory

LGBT rights opposition

LGBT themes in mythology

List of gay, lesbian or bisexual people

National Gay and Lesbian Task Force

Religion and sexuality

Sexuality and gender identity-based cultures

Stigma

References

Further reading

External links

2

Video games

A video game is an electronic game that involves human interaction with a user interface to generate visual feedback on a video device such as a TV screen or computer monitor. The word video in video game traditionally referred to a raster display device, but it now implies any type of display device that can produce two- or three-dimensional images.

The electronic systems used to play video games are known as platforms; examples of these are personal computers and video game consoles. These platforms range from large mainframe computers to small handheld computing devices. Specialized video games such as arcade games, while common in the 1980s, have gradually declined in use due to the widespread availability of home video game devices and video games on desktop and laptop computers and smartphones.

The input device used for games, the game controller, varies across platforms. Common controllers include gamepads, mouses, keyboards, joysticks, the touchscreens of mobile devices and buttons. In addition to video and audio feedback, some games include haptic, vibration or force feedback peripherals.

Video games have become an art form and an industry. The video game industry is of increasing commercial importance, with growth driven particularly by the emerging Asian markets and mobile games. As of 2015, video games generated sales of USD 74 billion annually worldwide, and were the third-largest segment in the U.S. entertainment market, behind broadcast and cable TV.

History

Early games used interactive electronic devices with various display formats. The earliest example is from 1947—a "Cathode ray tube Amusement Device" was filed for a patent on 25 January 1947, by Thomas T. Goldsmith Jr. and Estle Ray Mann, and issued on 14 December 1948, as U.S. Patent 2455992.

Inspired by radar display tech, it consisted of an analog device that allowed a user to control a vector-drawn dot on the screen to simulate a missile being fired at targets, which were drawings fixed to the screen.

Other early examples include:

The Nimrod computer at the 1951 Festival of Britain

OXO a tic-tac-toe Computer game by Alexander S. Douglas for the EDSAC in 1952

Tennis for Two, an electronic interactive game engineered by William Higinbotham in 1958

Spacewar!, written by MIT students Martin Graetz, Steve Russell, and Wayne Wiitanen's on a DEC PDP-1 computer in 1961.

Pong, a 1972 game by Atari.

Each game used different means of display: NIMROD used a panel of lights to play the game of Nim, OXO used a graphical display to play tic-tac-toe Tennis for Two used an oscilloscope to display a side view of a tennis court,

In 1971, Computer Space, created by Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney, was the first commercially sold, coin-operated video game. It used a black-and-white television for its display, and the computer system was made of 74 series TTL chips. The game was featured in the 1973 science fiction film Soylent Green. Computer Space was followed in 1972 by the Magnavox Odyssey, the first home console. Modeled after a late 1960s prototype console developed by Ralph H. Baer called the "Brown Box", it also used a standard television. These were followed by two versions of Atari's Pong; an arcade version in 1972 and a home version in 1975 that dramatically increased video game popularity. The commercial success of Pong led numerous other companies to develop Pong clones and their own systems, spawning the video game industry.

A flood of Pong clones eventually led to the video game crash of 1977, which came to an end with the mainstream success of Taito's 1978 shooter game Space Invaders, marking the beginning of the golden age of arcade video games and inspiring dozens of manufacturers to enter the market. The game inspired arcade machines to become prevalent in mainstream locations such as shopping malls, traditional storefronts, restaurants, and convenience stores. The game also became the subject of numerous articles and stories on television and in newspapers and magazines, establishing video gaming as a rapidly growing mainstream hobby. Space Invaders was soon licensed for the Atari VCS, becoming the first "killer app" and quadrupling the console's sales. This helped Atari recover from their earlier losses, and in turn the Atari VCS revived the home video game market during the second generation of consoles, up until the North American video game crash of 1983. The home video game industry was revitalized shortly afterwards by the widespread success of the Nintendo Entertainment System, which marked a shift in the dominance of the video game industry from the United States to Japan during the third generation of consoles.

Overview

Platforms

The term "platform" refers to the specific combination of electronic components or computer hardware which, in conjunction with software, allows a video game to operate. The term "system" is also commonly used.

In common use a "PC game" refers to a form of media that involves a player interacting with a personal computer connected to a video monitor. Personal computers are not dedicated platforms, so there may be differences running the same game in different hardwares, also the opennes allows some features to developers like reduced software cost, increased flexibility, increased innovation, emulation, creation of mods, open host for online gaming and others.

A "console game" is played on a specialized electronic device that connects to a common television set or composite video monitor, unlike PCs, a console is a dedicated platform, it is manufactured by a specific company. Usually runs only games developed for it, or games from other platform made by the same company, but never its direct competitor, even if the same game is available on different platforms. It often comes with an specific game controller.

A "handheld" gaming device is a self-contained electronic device that is portable and can be held in a user's hands. It features the console, screen, speakers and buttons in one single unit. Like consoles, handhelds are dedicated platforms, and share almost the same characteristics. Handheld hardware usually is less powerful than PC or console hardwares.

"Arcade game" generally refers to a game played on an even more specialized type of electronic device that is typically designed to play only one game and is encased in a special cabinet which has one built-in console, controller and screen.

These distinctions are not always clear and there may be games that bridge one or more platforms. In addition to personal computers, there are multiple other devices which have the ability to play games but are not dedicated video game machines, such as smartphones, PDAs and graphing calculators.

The web browser has also established itself as platform in its own right while providing a cross-platform environment for video games designed to be played on a wide spectrum of hardware from personal computers to smartphones to name a few. This in turn has generated new terms to qualify classes of web browser based games. These games may be identified based on the website that they appear, such as with "Facebook" games. Others are named based on the programming platform used to develop them, such as Java and Flash games.

Genres

A video game, like most other forms of media, may be categorized into genres. Video game genres are used to categorize video games based on their gameplay interaction rather than visual or narrative differences. A video game genre is defined by a set of gameplay challenges and are classified independent of their setting or game-world content, unlike other works of fiction such as films or books. For example, a shooter game is still a shooter game, regardless of whether it takes place in a fantasy world or in outer space.

Because genres are dependent on content for definition, genres have changed and evolved as newer styles of video games have come into existence. Ever advancing technology and production values related to video game development have fostered more lifelike and complex games which have in turn introduced or enhanced genre possibilities, pushed the boundaries of existing video gaming or in some cases add new possibilities in play . Some genres represent combinations of others, such as massively multiplayer online role-playing games, or, more commonly, MMORPGs. It is also common to see higher level genre terms that are collective in nature across all other genres such as with action, music/rhythm or horror-themed video games.

Classifications

Casual games

Casual games derive their name from their ease of accessibility, simple to understand gameplay and quick to grasp rule sets. Additionally, casual games frequently support the ability to jump in and out of play on demand. Casual games as a format existed long before the term was coined and include video games such as Solitaire or Minesweeper which can commonly be found pre-installed with many versions of the Microsoft Windows operating system.

Examples of genres within this category are match three, hidden object, time management, puzzle or many of the tower defense style games. Casual games are generally available through app stores and online retailers such as PopCap, Zylom and GameHouse or provided for free play through web portals such as Newgrounds.

While casual games are most commonly played on personal computers, phones or tablets, they can also be found on many of the on-line console system download services .

Serious games

Serious games are games that are designed primarily to convey information or a learning experience of some sort to the player. Some serious games may even fail to qualify as a video game in the traditional sense of the term. Educational software does not typically fall under this category and the primary distinction would appear to be based on the title's primary goal as well as target age demographics. As with the other categories, this description is more of a guideline than a rule.

Serious games are games generally made for reasons beyond simple entertainment and as with the core and casual games may include works from any given genre, although some such as exergames, educational games, or propaganda games may have a higher representation in this group due to their subject matter. These games are typically designed to be played by professionals as part of a specific job or for skill set improvement. They can also be created to convey social-political awareness on a specific subject.

One of the longest running serious games franchises would be Microsoft Flight Simulator first published in 1982 under that name. The United States military uses virtual reality based simulations, such as VBS1 for training exercises, as do a growing number of first responder roles . One example of a non-game environment utilized as a platform for serious game development would be the virtual world of Second Life, which is currently used by several United States governmental departments, Universities for educational and remote learning programs and businesses for meetings and training.

Tactical media in video games plays a crucial role in making a statement or conveying a message on important relevant issues. This form of media allows for a broader audience to be able to receive and gain access to certain information that otherwise may not have reached such people. An example of tactical media in video games would be newsgames. These are short games related to contemporary events designed to illustrate a point. For example, Take Action Games is a game studio collective that was co-founded by Susana Ruiz and has made successful serious games. Some of these games include Darfur is Dying, Finding Zoe, and In The Balance. All of these games bring awareness to important issues and events in an intelligent and well thought out manner.

Educational games

On 23 September 2009, U.S. President Barack Obama launched a campaign called "Educate to Innovate" aimed at improving the technological, mathematical, scientific and engineering abilities of American students. This campaign states that it plans to harness the power of interactive games to help achieve the goal of students excelling in these departments. This campaign has stemmed into many new opportunities for the video game realm and has contributed to many new competitions. Some of these competitions include the Stem National Video Game Competition and the Imagine Cup. Both of these examples are events that bring a focus to relevant and important current issues that are able to be addressed in the sense of video games to educate and spread knowledge in a new form of media. .org uses games to entice the user to learn about information pertaining to the Nobel prize achievements while engaging in a fun to play video game. There are many different types and styles of educational games all the way from counting to spelling to games for kids and games for adults. Some other games do not have any particular targeted audience in mind and intended to simply educate or inform whoever views or plays the game.

Development

Video game development and authorship, much like any other form of entertainment, is frequently a cross-disciplinary field. Video game developers, as employees within this industry are commonly referred, primarily include programmers and graphic designers. Over the years this has expanded to include almost every type of skill that one might see prevalent in the creation of any movie or television program, including sound designers, musicians, and other technicians; as well as skills that are specific to video games, such as the game designer. All of these are managed by producers.

In the early days of the industry, it was more common for a single person to manage all of the roles needed to create a video game. As platforms have become more complex and powerful in the type of material they can present, larger teams have been needed to generate all of the art, programming, cinematography, and more. This is not to say that the age of the "one-man shop" is gone, as this is still sometimes found in the casual gaming and handheld markets, where smaller games are prevalent due to technical limitations such as limited RAM or lack of dedicated 3D graphics rendering capabilities on the target platform .

With the growth of the size of development teams in the industry, the problem of cost has increased. Development studios need to be able to pay their staff a competitive wage in order to attract and retain the best talent, while publishers are constantly looking to keep costs down in order to maintain profitability on their investment. Typically, a video game console development team can range in sizes of anywhere from 5 to 50 people, with some teams exceeding 100. In May 2009, one game project was reported to have a development staff of 450. The growth of team size combined with greater pressure to get completed projects into the market to begin recouping production costs has led to a greater occurrence of missed deadlines, rushed games and the release of unfinished products.

Downloadable content

A phenomenon of additional game content at a later date, often for additional funds, began with digital video game distribution known as downloadable content . Developers can use digital distribution to issue new storylines after the main game is released, such as Rockstar Games with Grand Theft Auto IV, or Bethesda with Fallout 3 and its expansions. New gameplay modes can also become available, for instance, Call of Duty and its zombie modes, a multiplayer mode for Mushroom Wars or a higher difficulty level for Metro: Last Light. Smaller packages of DLC are also common, ranging from better in-game weapons, character outfits, or new songs to perform .

Modifications

Many games produced for the PC are designed such that technically oriented consumers can modify the game. These mods can add an extra dimension of replayability and interest. Developers such as id Software, Valve Software, Crytek, Bethesda, Epic Games and Blizzard Entertainment ship their games with some of the development tools used to make the game, along with documentation to assist mod developers. The Internet provides an inexpensive medium to promote and distribute mods, and they may be a factor in the commercial success of some games. This allows for the kind of success seen by popular mods such as the Half-Life mod Counter-Strike.

Cheating

Cheating in computer games may involve cheat codes and hidden spots implemented by the game developers, modification of game code by third parties, or players exploiting a software glitch. Modifications are facilitated by either cheat cartridge hardware or a software trainer.

Theory

Although departments of computer science have been studying the technical aspects of video games for years, theories that examine games as an artistic medium are a relatively recent development in the humanities. The two most visible schools in this emerging field are ludology and narratology. Narrativists approach video games in the context of what Janet Murray calls "Cyberdrama". That is to say, their major concern is with video games as a storytelling medium, one that arises out of interactive fiction. Murray puts video games in the context of the Holodeck, a fictional piece of technology from Star Trek, arguing for the video game as a medium in which we get to become another person, and to act out in another world. This image of video games received early widespread popular support, and forms the basis of films such as Tron, eXistenZ and The Last Starfighter.

Ludologists break sharply and radically from this idea. They argue that a video game is first and foremost a game, which must be understood in terms of its rules, interface, and the concept of play that it deploys. Espen J. Aarseth argues that, although games certainly have plots, characters, and aspects of traditional narratives, these aspects are incidental to gameplay. For example, Aarseth is critical of the widespread attention that narrativists have given to the heroine of the game Tomb Raider, saying that "the dimensions of Lara Croft's body, already analyzed to death by film theorists, are irrelevant to me as a player, because a different-looking body would not make me play differently... When I play, I don't even see her body, but see through it and past it." Simply put, ludologists reject traditional theories of art because they claim that the artistic and socially relevant qualities of a video game are primarily determined by the underlying set of rules, demands, and expectations imposed on the player.

While many games rely on emergent principles, video games commonly present simulated story worlds where emergent behavior occurs within the context of the game. The term "emergent narrative" has been used to describe how, in a simulated environment, storyline can be created simply by "what happens to the player." However, emergent behavior is not limited to sophisticated games. In general, any place where event-driven instructions occur for AI in a game, emergent behavior will exist. For instance, take a racing game in which cars are programmed to avoid crashing, and they encounter an obstacle in the track: the cars might then maneuver to avoid the obstacle causing the cars behind them to slow and/or maneuver to accommodate the cars in front of them and the obstacle. The programmer never wrote code to specifically create a traffic jam, yet one now exists in the game.

Emulation

Emulators are software that allow games to run on a different platform from the original hardware by replicate the behavior of a console, they are found in PCs, smartphones and other consoles. Emulators emerged in the early 1990s, they are generally used to play old games, hack existing games, translate unreleased games in an especific region or add enhanced features to games like improved graphics, speed up or down, bypass regional lockouts, or online multiplayer support.

In the United States, emulation without permission of the publisher is illegal. Due to great demand, began to emerge emulation officially, the first case was the Virtual Console on the Nintendo Wii, it was one of Nintendo's shares to prevent piracy.

Social aspects

Demographics

The November 2005 Nielsen Active Gamer Study, taking a survey of 2,000 regular gamers, found that the U.S. games market is diversifying. The age group among male players has expanded significantly in the 25–40 age group. For casual online puzzle-style and simple mobile cell phone games, the gender divide is more or less equal between males and females. Females have also been found to show an attraction to online multi-player games where there is a communal experience. More recently there has been a growing segment of female players engaged with the aggressive style of games historically considered to fall within traditionally male genres . According to the ESRB almost 41% of PC gamers are women

When comparing today's industry climate with that of 20 years ago, women and many adults are more inclined to be using products in the industry. While the market for teen and young adult men is still a strong market, it is the other demographics which are posting significant growth. The Entertainment Software Association provides the following summary for 2011 based on a study of almost 1,200 American households carried out by Ipsos MediaCT:

The average gamer is 30 years old and has been playing for 12 years. Eighty-two percent of gamers are 18 years of age or older.

Forty-two percent of all players are women and women over 18 years of age are one of the industry's fastest growing demographics.

Twenty-nine percent of game players are over the age of 50, an increase from nine percent in 1999.

Sixty-five percent of gamers play games with other gamers in person.

Fifty-five percent of gamers play games on their phones or handheld device.

A 2006 academic study, based on a survey answered by 10,000 gamers, identified the gaymers as a demographic group. A follow-up survey in 2009 studied the purchase habits and content preferences of people in the group.

Based on the study by NPD group in 2011, approximately 91 percent of children aged 2–17 play games.

Multiplayer

Video gaming has traditionally been a social experience. Multiplayer video games are those that can be played either competitively, sometimes in Electronic Sports, or cooperatively by using either multiple input devices, or by hotseating. Tennis for Two, arguably the first video game, was a two player game, as was its successor Pong. The first commercially available game console, the Magnavox Odyssey, had two controller inputs.

Since then, most consoles have been shipped with two or four controller inputs. Some have had the ability to expand to four, eight or as many as 12 inputs with additional adapters, such as the Multitap. Multiplayer arcade games typically feature play for two to four players, sometimes tilting the monitor on its back for a top-down viewing experience allowing players to sit opposite one another.

Many early computer games for non-PC descendant based platforms featured multiplayer support. Personal computer systems from Atari and Commodore both regularly featured at least two game ports. PC-based computer games started with a lower availability of multiplayer options because of technical limitations. PCs typically had either one or no game ports at all. Network games for these early personal computers were generally limited to only text based adventures or MUDs that were played remotely on a dedicated server. This was due both to the slow speed of modems, and the prohibitive cost involved with putting a computer online in such a way where multiple visitors could make use of it. However, with the advent of widespread local area networking technologies and Internet based online capabilities, the number of players in modern games can be 32 or higher, sometimes featuring integrated text and/or voice chat. Massively multiplayer online game can offer extremely high numbers of simultaneous players; Eve Online set a record with 65,303 players on a single server in 2013.

Behavioral effects

It has been shown that action video game players have better hand–eye coordination and visuo-motor skills, such as their resistance to distraction, their sensitivity to information in the peripheral vision and their ability to count briefly presented objects, than nonplayers.

Researchers found that such enhanced abilities could be acquired by training with action games, involving challenges that switch attention between different locations, but not with games requiring concentration on single objects.

It has been suggested by a few studies that online/offline video gaming can be used as a therapeutic tool in the treatment of different mental health concerns.

In Steven Johnson's book, Everything Bad Is Good for You, he argues that video games in fact demand far more from a player than traditional games like Monopoly. To experience the game, the player must first determine the objectives, as well as how to complete them. They must then learn the game controls and how the human-machine interface works, including menus and HUDs. Beyond such skills, which after some time become quite fundamental and are taken for granted by many gamers, video games are based upon the player navigating a highly complex system with many variables. This requires a strong analytical ability, as well as flexibility and adaptability. He argues that the process of learning the boundaries, goals, and controls of a given game is often a highly demanding one that calls on many different areas of cognitive function. Indeed, most games require a great deal of patience and focus from the player, and, contrary to the popular perception that games provide instant gratification, games actually delay gratification far longer than other forms of entertainment such as film or even many books. Some research suggests video games may even increase players' attention capacities.

Learning principles found in video games have been identified as possible techniques with which to reform the U.S. education system. It has been noticed that gamers adopt an attitude while playing that is of such high concentration, they do not realize they are learning, and that if the same attitude could be adopted at school, education would enjoy significant benefits. Students are found to be "learning by doing" while playing video games while fostering creative thinking.

The U.S. Army has deployed machines such as the PackBot and UAV vehicles, which make use of a game-style hand controller to make it more familiar for young people.

According to research discussed at the 2008 Convention of the American Psychological Association, certain types of video games can improve the gamers' dexterity as well as their ability to problem-solve. A study of 33 laparoscopic surgeons found that those who played video games were 27 percent faster at advanced surgical procedures and made 37 percent fewer errors compared to those who did not play video games. A second study of 303 laparoscopic surgeons also showed that surgeons who played video games requiring spatial skills and hand dexterity and then performed a drill testing these skills were significantly faster at their first attempt and across all 10 trials than the surgeons who did not play the video games first.

The research showing benefits from action games has been questioned due to methodological shortcomings, such as recruitment strategies and selection bias, potential placebo effects, and lack of baseline improvements in control groups. In addition, many of the studies are cross-sectional, and of the longitudinal interventional trials, not all have found effects.

Objections to video games

Like other media, video games have been the subject of objections, controversies and censorship, for instance because of depictions of violence, sexual themes, alcohol, tobacco and other drugs, propaganda, profanity or advertisements. Critics of video games include parents' groups, politicians, religious groups and other advocacy groups. Claims that some video games cause addiction or violent behavior continue to be made and to be disputed.

Ratings and censorship

ESRB

The Entertainment Software Rating Board gives video games maturity ratings based on their content. For example, a game might be rated T for Teen if the game contained obscene words or violence. If a game contains explicit violence or sexual themes, it is likely to receive an M for Mature rating, which means that no one under 17 should play it. There is a rated "A/O" games for "Adults Only" these games have massive violence or nudity. There are no laws that prohibit children from purchasing "M" rated games in the United States. Laws attempting to prohibit minors from purchasing "M" rated games were established in California, Illinois, Michigan, Minnesota, and Louisiana, but all were overturned on the grounds that these laws violated the First Amendment. However, many stores have opted to not sell such games to children anyway. Of course, video game laws vary from country to country. One of the most controversial games of all time, Manhunt 2 by Rockstar Studios, was given an AO rating by the ESRB until Rockstar could make the content more suitable for a mature audience.

Video game manufacturers usually exercise tight control over the games that are made available on their systems, so unusual or special-interest games are more likely to appear as PC games. Free, casual, and browser-based games are usually played on available computers, mobile phones, or PDAs.

PEGI

Pan European Game Information is a system that was developed to standardize the game ratings in all of Europe, the current members are: all EU members, except Germany and the 10 accession states; Norway; Switzerland. Iceland is expected to join soon, as are the 10 EU accession states. For all PEGI members, they use it as their sole system, with the exception of the UK, where if a game contains certain material, it must be rated by BBFC. The PEGI ratings are legally binding in Vienna and it is a criminal offence to sell a game to someone if it is rated above their age.

Germany: BPjM and USK

Stricter game rating laws mean that Germany does not operate within the PEGI. Instead, they adopt their own system of certification which is required by law. The Unterhaltungssoftware Selbstkontrolle checks every game before release and assigns an age rating to it – either none, 6 years of age, 12 years of age, 16 years of age or 18 years of age . It is forbidden for anyone, retailers, friends or parents alike, to allow a child access to a game for which he or she is underage. If a game is considered to be harmful to young people, it may be referred to the BPjM who may opt to place it on the Index upon which the game may not be sold openly or advertised in the open media. Such indexed titles are not "banned" and can still be legally obtained by adults, but it is considered a felony to supply these titles to a child.

Commercial aspects

Game sales

According to the market research firm SuperData, as of May 2015, the global games market was worth USD 74.2 billion. By region, North America accounted for $23.6 billion, Asia for $23.1 billion, Europe for $22.1 billion and South America for $4.5 billion. By market segment, mobile games were worth $22.3 billion, retail games 19.7 billion, free-to-play MMOs 8.7 billion, social games $7.9 billion, PC DLC 7.5 billion, and other categories $3 billion or less each.

In the United States, also according to SuperData, the share of video games in the entertainment market grew from 5% in 1985 to 13% in 2015, becoming the third-largest market segment behind broadcast and cable television. The research firm anticipated that Asia would soon overtake North America as the largest video game market due to the strong growth of free-to-play and mobile games.

Conventions

Gaming conventions are an important showcase of the industry. The annual gamescom in Cologne in August is the world's leading expo for video games in attendance. The E3 in June in Los Angeles is also of global importance, but is an event for industry insiders only. The Tokyo Game Show in September is the main fair in Asia.

Other notable conventions and trade fairs include Brasil Game Show in October, Paris Games Week in October–November, EB Games Expo in October, KRI, ChinaJoy in July and the annual Game Developers Conference.

Some publishers, developers and technology producers also host their own regular conventions, with BlizzCon, QuakeCon, Nvision and the X shows being prominent examples.

Museums

There are many video game museums around the world, including the Museum of Soviet Arcade Machines in Moscow and Saint-Petersburg and the Computer Game Museum in Berlin. The Museum of Art and Digital Entertainment in Oakland, California is a dedicated video game museum focusing on playable exhibits of console and computer games. The Video Game Museum in Rome is also dedicated to preserving videogames and their history. The International Center for the History of Electronic Games at The Strong in Rochester, New York contains one of the largest collections of electronic games and game-related historical materials in the world, including a exhibit which allows guests to play their way through the history of video games. The Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. has three video games on permanent display: Pac-Man, Dragon's Lair, and Pong.

The Museum of Modern Art has added a total of 20 video games and one video game console to its permanent Architecture and Design Collection since 2012. In 2012, the Smithsonian American Art Museum ran an exhibition on "The Art of Video Games". However, the reviews of the exhibit were mixed, including questioning whether video games belong in an art museum.

See also

Outline of video games

History of video games

List of video games

Notes

References

Williams, J. P., & Smith, J. H., eds. . The players' realm: studies on the culture of video games and gaming. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland & Co. ISBN 978-0-7864-2832-8

External links

by the French video game research association Ludoscience

Video games

Hatred

Hatred is a deep and emotional extreme dislike. It can be directed against individuals, groups, entities, objects, behaviors, or ideas. Hatred is often associated with feelings of anger, disgust and a disposition towards hostility.

Ethnolinguistics

James W. Underhill, in his Ethnolinguistics and Cultural Concepts: truth, love, hate & war, discusses the origin and the metaphoric representations of hate in various languages. He stresses that love and hate are social, and culturally constructed. For this reason, hate is historically situated. Although it is fair to say that one single emotion exists in English, French, and German, hate varies in the forms in which it is manifested. A certain relationless hatred is expressed in the French expression J'ai la haine, which has no equivalent in English. While for English-speakers, loving and hating invariably involve an object, or a person, and therefore, a relationship with something or someone, J'ai la haine precludes the idea of an emotion directed at a person. This is a form of frustration, apathy and animosity which churns within the subject but establishes no relationship with the world, other than an aimless desire for destruction. Underhill also considers French forms of anti-Americanism as a specific form of cultural resentment. At the same time, he analyses the hatred promoted by Ronald Reagan in his rhetoric directed against the "evil empire". In addition, Underhill suggests it is worrying that foreign languages are uncritically assimilating forms of hatred exported by neoconservative discourse which permeate these languages via the translation of political journalism and the rhetoric of the "war on terrorism" and the promotion of "security".

Psychoanalytic views

In psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud defined hate as an ego state that wishes to destroy the source of its unhappiness. More recently, the Penguin Dictionary of Psychology defines hate as a "deep, enduring, intense emotion expressing animosity, anger, and hostility towards a person, group, or object." Because hatred is believed to be long-lasting, many psychologists consider it to be more of an attitude or disposition than a temporary emotional state.

Neurological research

The neural correlates of hate have been investigated with an fMRI procedure. In this experiment, people had their brains scanned while viewing pictures of people they hated. The results showed increased activity in the middle frontal gyrus, right putamen, bilaterally in the premotor cortex, in the frontal pole, and bilaterally in the medial insular cortex of the human brain.

Legal issues

In the English language, a hate crime generally refers to criminal acts which are seen to have been motivated by hate. Those who commit hate crimes target victims because of their perceived membership in a certain social group, usually defined by race, gender, religion, sexual orientation, disability, class, ethnicity, nationality, age, gender identity, or political affiliation. Incidents may involve physical assault, destruction of property, bullying, harassment, verbal abuse or insults, or offensive graffiti or letters .

Hate speech is speech perceived to disparage a person or group of people based on their social or ethnic group, such as race, sex, age, ethnicity, nationality, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity, disability, language ability, ideology, social class, occupation, appearance, mental capacity, and any other distinction that might be considered a liability. The term covers written as well as oral communication and some forms of behaviors in a public setting. It is also sometimes called antilocution and is the first point on Allport's scale which measures prejudice in a society. In many countries, deliberate use of hate speech is a criminal offence prohibited under incitement to hatred legislation. It is often alleged that the criminalization of hate speech is sometimes used to discourage legitimate discussion of negative aspects of voluntary behavior . There is also some question as to whether or not hate speech falls under the protection of freedom of speech in some countries.

Both of these classifications have sparked debate, with counter-arguments such as, but not limited to, a difficulty in distinguishing motive and intent for crimes, as well as philosophical debate on the validity of valuing targeted hatred as a greater crime than general misanthropy and contempt for humanity being a potentially equal crime in and of itself.

Religious perspectives

Christianity

Both the Old and the New Testaments deal with hatred. Ecclesiastes 3:8 teaches that there is a "time to love, and a time to hate;". However, the Old Testament also contains condemnations of hatred. For example, "thou shalt not hate thy brother in thy heart". The New Testament emphasizes that evil intentions can be as serious as evil actions. Thus John counted hatred as serious as murder: "whosoever hateth his brother is a murderer and you know that no murderer hath eternal life abiding in himself".

It is popularly assumed that one can't "hate" and "love" the same person at the same time. But Psalm 139 says there is a kind of "perfect hatred" which is consistent with love, and is different from the "cruel hatred" shown by God's enemies. The Hebrew word describing David's "perfect hatred" means that it "brings a process to completion". In other words, goal oriented opposition. The ultimate opposition to those who oppose God would be to get them to love God. Or, failing that, to at least stop them from destroying others. The New Testament describes a similar, if not the same, process: "to deliver...unto Satan for the destruction of the flesh, that the spirit may be saved..."

Today's popular characterization of good hatred is to "hate the sin, but love the sinner". Examples of this concept can be found in the Old Testament through David's actions. It is not recorded that David ever physically punished or fought anybody for merely hating or denying God, but only for acts of aggression. He responded to evil proportionately. He defended himself and his nation from violence, but when people merely turned from God in their hearts, without physical violence, he composed Psalms. Presumably this was the kind of "hatred" in David's mind when he and his son wrote the only five verses in the Old Testament that suggest God "hates" not just the sin but the sinner.

The New Testament unambiguously aligns with the modern concept: it never says God or Jesus hates any person, or that anyone else should. Accordingly, Jesus hated the "doctrines" and "deeds" of the Nicolaitans, but not the Nicolaitans themselves. While Jesus hates sin, He inspires us to love our enemies by pointing out that God equally treats "the evil and the good".

Leviticus 19:17 provides one illustration of how popular concepts of love and hate today have departed from biblical concepts. The verse says "thou shalt not hate", but the rest of the verse explains what that means: "thou shalt...rebuke thy brother, and not sin upon him." Today's culture often agrees, calling that "tough love". While contemporary culture and the

Bible agree on this notion, they are in conflict over the definition of which behaviors deserve admonishment. At the most extreme points of difference, contemporary culture may consider the rebuking endorsed by the Bible to be hatred, especially if the behavior is permissible in secular society.

See also

Discrimination

Gossip

Misanthropy

Revenge

Self-loathing

Two Minutes Hate

References

Further reading

The Psychology of Hate by Robert Sternberg

Hatred: The Psychological Descent into Violence by Willard Gaylin

Why We Hate by Jack Levin

The Psychology of Good and Evil: Why Children, Adults, and Groups Help and Harm Others by Ervin Staub

Prisoners of Hate: The Cognitive Basis of Anger, Hostility, and Violence by Aaron T. Beck

Becoming Evil: How Ordinary People Commit Genocide and Mass Killing by James Waller

Ethnolinguistics and Cultural Concepts: truth, love, hate & war, by James W. Underhill, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Life

Life is a characteristic distinguishing physical entities having biological processes from those that do not, either because such functions have ceased, or because they lack such functions and are classified as inanimate. Various forms of life exist such as plants, animals, fungi, protists, archaea, and bacteria. The criteria can at times be ambiguous and may or may not define viruses, viroids or potential artificial life as living. Biology is the primary science concerned with the study of life, although many other sciences are involved.

The smallest contiguous unit of life is called an organism. Organisms are composed of one or more cells, undergo metabolism, maintain homeostasis, can grow, respond to stimuli, reproduce and, through evolution, adapt to their environment in successive generations. The earliest life on Earth arose at least 3.5 billion years ago, during the Eoarchean Era when sufficient crust had solidified following the molten Hadean Eon. The earliest physical evidence of life on Earth is biogenic graphite from 3.7 billion-year-old metasedimentary rocks found in Western Greenland and microbial mat fossils in 3.48 billion-year-old sandstone found in Western Australia. Some theories, such as the Late Heavy Bombardment theory, suggest that life on Earth may have started even earlier, and may have begun as early as 4.1 billion years ago according to a 2015 study, or even, 4.25 billion years ago, or even earlier yet, 4.4 billion years ago, according to another study. According to one of the researchers, "If life arose relatively quickly on Earth ... then it could be common in the universe." that ever lived on Earth are estimated to be extinct. Estimates on the number of Earth's current species range from 10 million to 14 million, of which about 1.2 million have been documented and over 86 percent have not yet been described.

The chemistry leading to life may have begun shortly after the Big Bang, 13.8 billion years ago, during a habitable epoch when the Universe was only 10–17 million years old. Though life is confirmed only on the Earth, many think that extraterrestrial life is not only plausible, but probable or inevitable. Other planets and moons in the Solar System and other planetary systems are being examined for evidence of having once supported simple life, and projects such as SETI are trying to detect radio transmissions from possible alien civilizations.

The meaning of life—its significance, origin, purpose, and ultimate fate—is a central concept and question in philosophy and religion. Both philosophy and religion have offered interpretations as to how life relates to existence and consciousness, and on related issues such as life stance, purpose, conception of a god or gods, a soul or an afterlife. Different cultures throughout history have had widely varying approaches to these issues.

Early theories

Materialism

Some of the earliest theories of life were materialist, holding that all that exists is matter, and that life is merely a complex form or arrangement of matter. Empedocles argued that every thing in the universe is made up of a combination of four eternal "elements" or "roots of all": earth, water, air, and fire. All change is explained by the arrangement and rearrangement of these four elements. The various forms of life are caused by an appropriate mixture of elements.

Democritus thought that the essential characteristic of life is having a soul . Like other ancient writers, he was attempting to explain what makes something a living thing. His explanation was that fiery atoms make a soul in exactly the same way atoms and void account for any other thing. He elaborates on fire because of the apparent connection between life and heat, and because fire moves.

The mechanistic materialism that originated in ancient Greece was revived and revised by the French philosopher René Descartes, who held that animals and humans were assemblages of parts that together functioned as a machine. In the 19th century, the advances in cell theory in biological science encouraged this view. The evolutionary theory of Charles Darwin is a mechanistic explanation for the origin of species by means of natural selection.

Hylomorphism

Hylomorphism is a theory, originating with Aristotle, that all things are a combination of matter and form. Biology was one of his main interests, and there is extensive biological material in his extant writings. In this view, all things in the material universe have both matter and form, and the form of a living thing is its soul . There are three kinds of souls: the vegetative soul of plants, which causes them to grow and decay and nourish themselves, but does not cause motion and sensation; the animal soul, which causes animals to move and feel; and the rational soul, which is the source of consciousness and reasoning, which is found only in man. Each higher soul has all the attributes of the lower one. Aristotle believed that while matter can exist without form, form cannot exist without matter, and therefore the soul cannot exist without the body.

This account is consistent with teleological explanations of life, which account for phenomena in terms of purpose or goal-directedness. Thus, the whiteness of the polar bear's coat is explained by its purpose of camouflage. The direction of causality is in contradiction with the scientific evidence for natural selection, which explains the consequence in terms of a prior cause. Biological features are explained not by looking at future optimal results, but by looking at the past evolutionary history of a species, which led to the natural selection of the features in question.

Vitalism

Vitalism is the belief that the life-principle is non-material. This originated with Stahl, and held sway until the middle of the 19th century. It appealed to philosophers such as Henri Bergson, Nietzsche, Wilhelm Dilthey, anatomists like Bichat, and chemists like Liebig. Vitalism included the idea that there was a fundamental difference between organic and inorganic material, and the belief that organic material can only be derived from living things. This was disproved in 1828, when Friedrich Wöhler prepared urea from inorganic materials. This Wöhler synthesis is considered the starting point of modern organic chemistry. It is of historical significance because for the first time an organic compound was produced in inorganic reactions. These results led to the abandonment of scientific interest in vitalistic theories, although the belief lingered on in pseudoscientific theories such as homeopathy, which interprets diseases and sickness as caused by disturbances in a hypothetical vital force or life force.

Definitions

It is a challenge for scientists and philosophers to define life. This is partially because life is a process, not a substance. Any definition must be general enough to both encompass all known life and any unknown life that may be different from life on Earth. Some may even consider that life is not real at all, but a concept instead.

Biology

Since there is no unequivocal definition of life, the current understanding is descriptive. Life is considered a characteristic of something that exhibits all or most of the following traits:

# Homeostasis: Regulation of the internal environment to maintain a constant state; for example, sweating to reduce temperature.

# Organization: Being structurally composed of one or more cells — the basic units of life.

# Metabolism: Transformation of energy by converting chemicals and energy into cellular components and decomposing organic matter . Living things require energy to maintain internal organization and to produce the other phenomena associated with life. "with an error rate below the sustainability threshold." many of these are based upon chemical systems. Biophysicists have commented that living things function on negative entropy. In other words, living processes can be viewed as a delay of the spontaneous diffusion or dispersion of the internal energy of biological molecules towards more potential microstates. In more detail, according to physicists such as John Bernal, Erwin Schrödinger, Eugene Wigner, and John Avery, life is a member of the class of phenomena that are open or continuous systems able to decrease their internal entropy at the expense of substances or free energy taken in from the environment and subsequently rejected in a degraded form. At a higher level, living beings are thermodynamic systems that have an organized molecular structure. Hence, life is a self-sustained chemical system capable of undergoing Darwinian evolution.

Others take a systemic viewpoint that does not necessarily depend on molecular chemistry. One systemic definition of life is that living things are self-organizing and autopoietic . Variations of this definition include Stuart Kauffman's definition as an autonomous agent or a multi-agent system capable of reproducing itself or themselves, and of completing at least one thermodynamic work cycle.

Viruses

Viruses are most often considered replicators rather than forms of life. They have been described as "organisms at the edge of life," since they possess genes, evolve by natural selection, and replicate by creating multiple copies of themselves through self-assembly. However, viruses do not metabolize and they require a host cell to make new products. Virus self-assembly within host cells has implications for the study of the origin of life, as it may support the hypothesis that life could have started as self-assembling organic molecules.

Living systems theories

The idea that the Earth is alive is found in philosophy and religion, but the first scientific discussion of it was by the Scottish scientist James Hutton. In 1785, he stated that the Earth was a superorganism and that its proper study should be physiology. Hutton is considered the father of geology, but his idea of a living Earth was forgotten in the intense reductionism of the 19th century. The Gaia hypothesis, proposed in the 1960s by scientist James Lovelock, suggests that life on Earth functions as a single organism that defines and maintains environmental conditions necessary for its survival.

The first attempt at a general living systems theory for explaining the nature of life was in 1978, by American biologist James Grier Miller. Such a general theory, arising out of the ecological and biological sciences, attempts to map general principles for how all living systems work. Instead of examining phenomena by attempting to break things down into component parts, a general living systems theory explores phenomena in terms of dynamic patterns of the relationships of organisms with their environment. Robert Rosen built on this by defining a system component as "a unit of organization; a part with a function, i.e., a definite relation between part and whole." From this and other starting concepts, he developed a "relational theory of systems" that attempts to explain the special properties of life. Specifically, he identified the "nonfractionability of components in an organism" as the fundamental difference between living systems and "biological machines."

A systems view of life treats environmental fluxes and biological fluxes together as a "reciprocity of influence", and a reciprocal relation with environment is arguably as important for understanding life as it is for understanding ecosystems. As Harold J. Morowitz explains it, life is a property of an ecological system rather than a single organism or species. He argues that an ecosystemic definition of life is preferable to a strictly biochemical or physical one. Robert Ulanowicz highlights mutualism as the key to understand the systemic, order-generating behavior of life and ecosystems.

Complex systems biology is a field of science that studies the emergence of complexity in functional organisms from the viewpoint of dynamic systems theory. The latter is often called also systems biology and aims to understand the most fundamental aspects of life. A closely related approach to CSB and systems biology, called relational biology, is concerned mainly with understanding life processes in terms of the most important relations, and categories of such relations among the essential functional components of organisms; for multicellular organisms, this has been defined as "categorical biology", or a model representation of organisms as a category theory of biological relations, and also an algebraic topology of the functional organization of living organisms in terms of their dynamic, complex networks of metabolic, genetic, epigenetic processes and signaling pathways.

It has also been argued that the evolution of order in living systems and certain physical systems obey a common fundamental principle termed the Darwinian dynamic. The Darwinian dynamic was formulated by first considering how macroscopic order is generated in a simple non-biological system far from thermodynamic equilibrium, and then extending consideration to short, replicating RNA molecules. The underlying order generating process for both types of system was concluded to be basically similar. and also proposes that an organism is 'any system with an organisation that complies with an operator type that is at least as complex as the cell. Life can also be modeled as a network of inferior negative feedbacks of regulatory mechanisms subordinated to a superior positive feedback formed by the potential of expansion and reproduction.

Origin

Evidence suggests that life on Earth has existed for at least 3.5 billion years, with the oldest physical traces of life dating back 3.7 billion years.

There is no current scientific consensus as to how life originated. However, most accepted scientific models build on the following observations:

The Miller–Urey experiment, and the work of Sidney Fox, show that conditions on the primitive Earth favored chemical reactions that synthesize amino acids and other organic compounds from inorganic precursors.

Phospholipids spontaneously form lipid bilayers, the basic structure of a cell membrane.

Living organisms synthesize proteins, which are polymers of amino acids using instructions encoded by deoxyribonucleic acid . Protein synthesis entails intermediary ribonucleic acid polymers. One possibility for how life began is that genes originated first, followed by proteins; the alternative being that proteins came first and then genes.

However, since genes and proteins are both required to produce the other, the problem of considering which came first is like that of the chicken or the egg. Most scientists have adopted the hypothesis that because of this, it is unlikely that genes and proteins arose independently.

Therefore, a possibility, first suggested by Francis Crick, is that the first life was based on RNA, but they were confirmed by Thomas Cech in 1986.

One issue with the RNA world hypothesis is that synthesis of RNA from simple inorganic precursors is more difficult than for other organic molecules. One reason for this is that RNA precursors are very stable and react with each other very slowly under ambient conditions, and it has also been proposed that living organisms consisted of other molecules before RNA. However, the successful synthesis of certain RNA molecules under the conditions that existed prior to life on Earth has been achieved by adding alternative precursors in a specified order with the precursor phosphate present throughout the reaction. This study makes the RNA world hypothesis more plausible.

Geological findings in 2013 showed that reactive phosphorus species were in abundance in the ocean before 3.5 Ga, and that Schreibersite easily reacts with aqueous glycerol to generate phosphite and glycerol 3-phosphate. It is hypothesized that Schreibersite-containing meteorites from the Late Heavy Bombardment could have provided early reduced phosphorus, which could react with prebiotic organic molecules to form phosphorylated biomolecules, like RNA.

In 2009, experiments demonstrated Darwinian evolution of a two-component system of RNA enzymes in vitro. The work was performed in the laboratory of Gerald Joyce, who stated, "This is the first example, outside of biology, of evolutionary adaptation in a molecular genetic system."

Prebiotic compounds may have extraterrestrial origin. NASA findings in 2011, based on studies with meteorites found on Earth, suggest DNA and RNA components may be formed in outer space.

In March 2015, NASA scientists reported that, for the first time, complex DNA and RNA organic compounds of life, including uracil, cytosine and thymine, have been formed in the laboratory under outer space conditions, using starting chemicals, such as pyrimidine, found in meteorites. Pyrimidine, like polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, the most carbon-rich chemical found in the Universe, may have been formed in red giants or in interstellar dust and gas clouds, according to the scientists.

According to the panspermia hypothesis, microscopic life—distributed by meteoroids, asteroids and other small Solar System bodies—may exist throughout the universe.

Environmental conditions

The diversity of life on Earth is a result of the dynamic interplay between genetic opportunity, metabolic capability, environmental challenges, and symbiosis. For most of its existence, Earth's habitable environment has been dominated by microorganisms and subjected to their metabolism and evolution. As a consequence of these microbial activities, the physical-chemical environment on Earth has been changing on a geologic time scale, thereby affecting the path of evolution of subsequent life.—often represented by the acronym CHNOPS. Together these make up nucleic acids, proteins and lipids, the bulk of living matter. Five of these six elements comprise the chemical components of DNA, the exception being sulfur. The latter is a component of the amino acids cysteine and methionine. The most biologically abundant of these elements is carbon, which has the desirable attribute of forming multiple, stable covalent bonds. This allows carbon-based molecules to form an immense variety of chemical arrangements. Alternative hypothetical types of biochemistry have been proposed that eliminate one or more of these elements, swap out an element for one not on the list, or change required chiralities or other chemical properties.

Range of tolerance

The inert components of an ecosystem are the physical and chemical factors necessary for life — energy, water, temperature, atmosphere, gravity, nutrients, and ultraviolet solar radiation protection. In most ecosystems, the conditions vary during the day and from one season to the next. To live in most ecosystems, then, organisms must be able to survive a range of conditions, called the "range of tolerance." Outside that are the "zones of physiological stress", where the survival and reproduction are possible but not optimal. Beyond these zones are the "zones of intolerance", where survival and reproduction of that organism is unlikely or impossible. Organisms that have a wide range of tolerance are more widely distributed than organisms with a narrow range of tolerance.

Microbial life forms thrive even in the Mariana Trench, the deepest spot on the Earth. Microbes also thrive inside rocks up to 1900 feet below the sea floor under 8500 feet of ocean.

Investigation of the tenacity and versatility of life on Earth, as well as an understanding of the molecular systems that some organisms utilize to survive such extremes, is important for the search for life beyond Earth.

Form and function

Cells are the basic unit of structure in every living thing, and all cells arise from pre-existing cells by division. Cell theory was formulated by Henri Dutrochet, Theodor Schwann, Rudolf Virchow and others during the early nineteenth century, and subsequently became widely accepted. The activity of an organism depends on the total activity of its cells, with energy flow occurring within and between them. Cells contain hereditary information that is carried forward as a genetic code during cell division.

There are two primary types of cells. Prokaryotes lack a nucleus and other membrane-bound organelles, although they have circular DNA and ribosomes. Bacteria and Archaea are two domains of prokaryotes. The other primary type of cells are the eukaryotes, which have distinct nuclei bound by a nuclear membrane and membrane-bound organelles, including mitochondria, chloroplasts, lysosomes, rough and smooth endoplasmic reticulum, and vacuoles. In addition, they possess organized chromosomes that store genetic material. All species of large complex organisms are eukaryotes, including animals, plants and fungi, though most species of eukaryote are protist microorganisms. The conventional model is that eukaryotes evolved from prokaryotes, with the main organelles of the eukaryotes forming through endosymbiosis between bacteria and the progenitor eukaryotic cell.

The molecular mechanisms of cell biology are based on proteins. Most of these are synthesized by the ribosomes through an enzyme-catalyzed process called protein biosynthesis. A sequence of amino acids is assembled and joined together based upon gene expression of the cell's nucleic acid. In eukaryotic cells, these proteins may then be transported and processed through the Golgi apparatus in preparation for dispatch to their destination.

Cells reproduce through a process of cell division in which the parent cell divides into two or more daughter cells. For prokaryotes, cell division occurs through a process of fission in which the DNA is replicated, then the two copies are attached to parts of the cell membrane. In eukaryotes, a more complex process of mitosis is followed. However, the end result is the same; the resulting cell copies are identical to each other and to the original cell, and both are capable of further division following an interphase period.

Multicellular organisms may have first evolved through the formation of colonies of like cells. These cells can form group organisms through cell adhesion. The individual members of a colony are capable of surviving on their own, whereas the members of a true multi-cellular organism have developed specializations, making them dependent on the remainder of the organism for survival. Such organisms are formed clonally or from a single germ cell that is capable of forming the various specialized cells that form the adult organism. This specialization allows multicellular organisms to exploit resources more efficiently than single cells.

Cells have evolved methods to perceive and respond to their microenvironment, thereby enhancing their adaptability. Cell signaling coordinates cellular activities, and hence governs the basic functions of multicellular organisms. Signaling between cells can occur through direct cell contact using juxtacrine signalling, or indirectly through the exchange of agents as in the endocrine system. In more complex organisms, coordination of activities can occur through a dedicated nervous system.

Classification

The first known attempt to classify organisms was conducted by the Greek philosopher Aristotle, who classified all living organisms known at that time as either a plant or an animal, based mainly on their ability to move. He also distinguished animals with blood from animals without blood, which can be compared with the concepts of vertebrates and invertebrates respectively, and divided the blooded animals into five groups: viviparous quadrupeds, oviparous quadrupeds, birds, fishes and whales. The bloodless animals were also divided into five groups: cephalopods, crustaceans, insects, shelled animals and "zoophytes." Though Aristotle's work in zoology was not without errors, it was the grandest biological synthesis of the time and remained the ultimate authority for many centuries after his death.

The exploration of the American continent revealed large numbers of new plants and animals that needed descriptions and classification. In the latter part of the 16th century and the beginning of the 17th, careful study of animals commenced and was gradually extended until it formed a sufficient body of knowledge to serve as an anatomical basis for classification. In the late 1740s, Carl Linnaeus introduced his system of binomial nomenclature for the classification of species. Linnaeus attempted to improve the composition and reduce the length of the previously used many-worded names by abolishing unnecessary rhetoric, introducing new descriptive terms and precisely defining their meaning. By consistently using this system, Linnaeus separated nomenclature from taxonomy.

The fungi were originally treated as plants. For a short period Linnaeus had classified them in the taxon Vermes in Animalia, but later placed them back in Plantae. Copeland classified the Fungi in his Protoctista, thus partially avoiding the problem but acknowledging their special status. The problem was eventually solved by Whittaker, when he gave them their own kingdom in his five-kingdom system. Evolutionary history shows that the fungi are more closely related to animals than to plants.

As new discoveries enabled detailed study of cells and microorganisms, new groups of life were revealed, and the fields of cell biology and microbiology were created. These new organisms were originally described separately in protozoa as animals and protophyta/thallophyta as plants, but were united by Haeckel in the kingdom Protista; later, the prokaryotes were split off in the kingdom Monera, which would eventually be divided into two separate groups, the Bacteria and the Archaea. This led to the six-kingdom system and eventually to the current three-domain system, which is based on evolutionary relationships.

As microbiology, molecular biology and virology developed, non-cellular reproducing agents were discovered, such as viruses and viroids. Whether these are considered alive has been a matter of debate; viruses lack characteristics of life such as cell membranes, metabolism and the ability to grow or respond to their environments. Viruses can still be classed into "species" based on their biology and genetics, but many aspects of such a classification remain controversial.

In the 1960s a trend called cladistics emerged, arranging taxa based on clades in an evolutionary or phylogenetic tree.

Extraterrestrial life

Earth is the only planet known to harbor life. Other locations within the Solar System that may host microbial life include subsurface Mars, the atmosphere of Venus, and subsurface oceans on some of the moons of the gas giant planets. The variables of the Drake equation are used to discuss the conditions in solar systems where civilization is most likely to exist.

Beyond the solar system, the region around another main sequence star that could support Earth-like life on an Earth-like planet is known as the habitable zone. The inner and outer radii of this zone vary with the luminosity of the star, as does the time interval during which the zone survives. Stars more massive than the Sun have a larger habitable zone, but remain on the main sequence for a shorter time interval. Small red dwarf stars have the opposite problem, with a smaller habitable zone that is subject to higher levels of magnetic activity and the effects of tidal locking from close orbits. Hence, stars in the intermediate mass range such as the Sun may have a greater likelihood for Earth-like life to develop. The location of the star within a galaxy may also have an impact on the likelihood of life forming. Stars in regions with a greater abundance of heavier elements that can form planets, in combination with a low rate of potentially habitat-damaging supernova events, are predicted to have a higher probability of hosting planets with complex life.

In 2004, scientists reported detecting the spectral signatures of anthracene and pyrene in the ultraviolet light emitted by the Red Rectangle nebula . This discovery was considered a confirmation of a hypothesis that as nebulae of the same type as the Red Rectangle approach the ends of their lives, convection currents cause carbon and hydrogen in the nebulae's core to get caught in stellar winds, and radiate outward. As they cool, the atoms supposedly bond to each other in various ways and eventually form particles of a million or more atoms. The scientists inferred

In 2010, fullerenes were detected in nebulae. Fullerenes have been implicated in the origin of life; according to astronomer Letizia Stanghellini, "It's possible that buckyballs from outer space provided seeds for life on Earth."

In August 2011, findings by NASA, based on studies of meteorites found on Earth, suggests DNA and RNA components, building blocks for life as we know it, may be formed extraterrestrially in outer space.

In October 2011, scientists found using spectroscopy that cosmic dust contains complex organic matter that could be created naturally, and rapidly, by stars. The compounds are so complex that their chemical structures resemble the makeup of coal and petroleum; such chemical complexity was previously thought to arise only from living organisms. One of the scientists suggested that these compounds may have been related to the development of life on Earth and said that, "If this is the case, life on Earth may have had an easier time getting started as these organics can serve as basic ingredients for life." Glycolaldehyde is needed to form ribonucleic acid, or RNA, which is similar in function to DNA. This finding suggests that complex organic molecules may form in stellar systems prior to the formation of planets, eventually arriving on young planets early in their formation.

In September 2012, NASA scientists reported that polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, subjected to interstellar medium conditions, are transformed, through hydrogenation, oxygenation and hydroxylation, to more complex organics – "a step along the path toward amino acids and nucleotides, the raw materials of proteins and DNA, respectively". Further, as a result of these transformations, the PAHs lose their spectroscopic signature which could be one of the reasons "for the lack of PAH detection in interstellar ice grains, particularly the outer regions of cold, dense clouds or the upper molecular layers of protoplanetary disks."

In 2013, the Atacama Large Millimeter Array confirmed that researchers have discovered an important pair of prebiotic molecules in the icy particles in interstellar space . The chemicals, found in a giant cloud of gas about 25,000 light-years from Earth in ISM, may be a precursor to a key component of DNA and the other may have a role in the formation of an important amino acid. Researchers found a molecule called cyanomethanimine, which produces adenine, one of the four nucleobases that form the "rungs" in the ladder-like structure of DNA. The other molecule, called ethanamine, is thought to play a role in forming alanine, one of the twenty amino acids in the genetic code. Previously, scientists thought such processes took place in the very tenuous gas between the stars. The new discoveries, however, suggest that the chemical formation sequences for these molecules occurred not in gas, but on the surfaces of ice grains in interstellar space. NASA ALMA scientist Anthony Remijan stated that finding these molecules in an interstellar gas cloud means that important building blocks for DNA and amino acids can 'seed' newly formed planets with the chemical precursors for life.

In January 2014, NASA reported that current studies on the planet Mars by the Curiosity and Opportunity rovers will now be searching for evidence of ancient life, including a biosphere based on autotrophic, chemotrophic and/or chemolithoautotrophic microorganisms, as well as ancient water, including fluvio-lacustrine environments that may have been habitable. The search for evidence of habitability, taphonomy, and organic carbon on the planet Mars is now a primary NASA objective.

Death

Death is the permanent termination of all vital functions or life processes in an organism or cell. It can occur as a result of an accident, medical conditions, biological interaction, malnutrition, poisoning, senescence, or suicide. After death, the remains of an organism re-enter the biogeochemical cycle. Organisms may be consumed by a predator or a scavenger and leftover organic material may then be further decomposed by detritivores, organisms that recycle detritus, returning it to the environment for reuse in the food chain.

One of the challenges in defining death is in distinguishing it from life. Death would seem to refer to either the moment life ends, or when the state that follows life begins. The moment of extinction is generally considered the death of the last individual of that species. Because a species' potential range may be very large, determining this moment is difficult, and is usually done retrospectively after a period of apparent absence. Species become extinct when they are no longer able to survive in changing habitat or against superior competition. In Earth's history, over 99% of all the species that have ever lived have gone extinct; however, mass extinctions may have accelerated evolution by providing opportunities for new groups of organisms to diversify.

Fossils are the preserved remains or traces of animals, plants, and other organisms from the remote past. The totality of fossils, both discovered and undiscovered, and their placement in fossil-containing rock formations and sedimentary layers is known as the fossil record. A preserved specimen is called a fossil if it is older than the arbitrary date of 10,000 years ago. Hence, fossils range in age from the youngest at the start of the Holocene Epoch to the oldest from the Archaean Eon, up to 3.4 billion years old.

Artificial life

Artificial life is a field of study that examines systems related to life, its processes, and its evolution through simulations using computer models, robotics, and biochemistry. The study of artificial life imitates traditional biology by recreating some aspects of biological phenomena. Scientists study the logic of living systems by creating artificial environments—seeking to understand the complex information processing that defines such systems. While life is, by definition, alive, artificial life is generally referred to as data confined to a digital environment and existence.

Synthetic biology is a new area of biotechnology that combines science and biological engineering. The common goal is the design and construction of new biological functions and systems not found in nature. Synthetic biology includes the broad redefinition and expansion of biotechnology, with the ultimate goals of being able to design and build engineered biological systems that process information, manipulate chemicals, fabricate materials and structures, produce energy, provide food, and maintain and enhance human health and the environment.

Phanerozoic Eon

The Phanerozoic Eon is the current eon in Earth's history. The Phanerozoic began 540 million years ago and continues to the present. The Phanerozoic comprises the Paleozoic Era, the Mesozoic Era, and the Cenozoic Era. This eon is when the diversity of life increases dramatically, starting with the Cambrian Explosion.

Paleozoic Era

The Paleozoic is a time in earth's history when complex life forms evolve, take their first breath of oxygen on dry land, and when the forerunner of all life on earth begin to diversify. There are six periods in the Paleozoic eras: the Cambrian, the Ordovician, the Silurian, the Devonian, the Carboniferous and the Permian.

Cambrian

The Cambrian spans from 540 million years to 485 million years ago and is the first period of the Paleozoic and of the Phanerozoic Eon. The Cambrian sparks a boom in evolution in an event known as the Cambrian Explosion in which the largest number of creatures evolve in the history of Earth during one period. Creatures like algae evolve, but most of the water is populated by armored arthropods, like trilobites. Almost all marine phyla evolved in this period. During this time, the super-continent Rodinia begins to break up, most of which becomes the super-continent Gondwana.

Ordovician

The Ordovician spans from 485 million years to 440 million years ago. The Ordovician is a time in earths history in which many species still prevalent today evolved, such as primitive fish, cephalopods, and coral. The most common forms of life, however, were trilobites, snails and shellfish. More importantly, the first arthropods went ashore to colonize the empty continent of Gondwana. By the end of the period, Gondwana was at the south pole, early North America had collided with Europe, closing the Atlantic Ocean. Glaciation of Africa resulted in a major drop in sea level, killing off all life that staked a claim along coastal Gondwana. Glaciation caused a snowball earth, and the Ordovician-Silurian extinction in which 60% of marine invertebrates and 25% of families went extinct, and is considered the first mass extinction and the second deadliest extinction.

Silurian

The Silurian spans from 440 million years to 415 million years ago. The Silurian saw the healing of the earth that recovered from the snowball earth. This period saw the mass evolution of fish, as jaw-less fish became more numerous, jawed fish evolved, and the first freshwater fish evolved, though arthropods, such as sea scorpions, were still apex predators. Fully terrestrial life evolved, which included early arachnids, fungi, and centipedes. Also, the evolution of vascular plants allowed plants to gain a foothold on land. These early plants are the forerunners of all plant life on land. During this time, there are four continents: Gondwana, Laurentia, Baltica, and Avalonia . The recent rise in sea levels provided many new species to thrive in water.

Devonian

The Devonian spans from 415 million years to 360 million years ago. Also known as "The Age of the Fish", the Devonian features a huge diversification of fish, including armored fish like Dunkleosteus and lobe-finned fish which eventually evolved into the first tetrapods. On land, plant groups diversified incredibly in an event known as the Devonian Explosion where the first trees evolved, as well as seeds. This event also diversified arthropod life. The first amphibians also evolved, and the fish were now at the top of the food chain. Near the end of the Devonian, 70% of all species went extinct in an event known as the Late Devonian extinction and is the second mass extinction event the world has seen.

Carboniferous

The Carboniferous spans from 360 million to 300 million years ago. During this time, average global temperatures were exceedingly high; the early Carboniferous averaged at about 20 degrees Celsius . Tropical swamps dominated the earth, and the large amounts of trees created much of the carbon for the coal that is used today . Perhaps the most important evolutionary development of the time was the evolution of amniotic eggs, which allowed amphibians to head farther inland and remained the dominant vertebrates throughout the duration of this period. Also, the first reptiles and synapsids evolved in the swamps. Throughout the Carboniferous, there was a cooling pattern, which eventually led to the glaciation of Gondwana as much of it was situated around the south pole in an event known as the Permo-Carboniferous glaciation or the Carboniferous Rainforest Collapse.

Permian

The Permian spans from 300 million to 250 million years ago and was the last period of the Paleozoic. At the beginning, all continents formed together to form the super-continent Pangaea and had one ocean called Panthalassa. The earth was very dry during this time, with harsh seasons as the climate of the interior of Pangaea wasn't regulated by large bodies of water. Reptiles and synapsids flourished in the new dry climate. Creatures such as Dimetrodon and Edaphosaurus ruled the new continent. The first conifers evolve, and dominate the terrestrial landscape. Nearing the end of the Permian, however, Pangaea got drier and drier. The interior was nothing but dry deserts, and new species such as Scutosaurus and Gorgonopsid filled the empty desert. Eventually, they disappeared, along with 95% of all life on earth in an event simply known as "the Great Dying", and is the third mass extinction event of the world.

Mesozoic Era

Also known as "the Age of the dinosaurs", the Mesozoic features the rise of reptiles on their 150 million year conquest to rule the earth from the seas, the land, and even in the air. There are 3 periods in the Mesozoic: the Triassic, the Jurassic, and the Cretaceous.

Triassic

The Triassic ranges from 250 million to 200 million years ago. The Triassic is a desolate transitional state in Earth's history between the Permian Extinction and the lush Jurassic Period. It has three major epochs: the Early Triassic, the Middle Triassic and the Late Triassic.

The Early Triassic lived between 250 million to 247 million years ago and was dominated by deserts as Pangaea had not yet broken up, thus the interior was nothing but arid. The Earth had just witnessed a massive die-off in which 95% of all life went extinct. The most common life on earth were Lystrosaurus, Labyrinthodont, and Euparkeria along with many other creatures that managed to survive the Great Dying. Temnospondyli evolved during this time and would be the dominant predator for much of the Triassic.

The Middle Triassic spans from 247 million to 237 million years ago. The Middle Triassic featured the beginnings of the breakup of Pangaea, and the beginning of the Tethys Sea. The ecosystem had recovered from the devastation that was the Great Dying. Phytoplankton, coral, and crustaceans all had recovered, and the reptiles began to get bigger and bigger. New aquatic reptiles evolved such as Ichthyosaurs and Nothosaurs. Meanwhile, on land, Pine forests flourished, bringing along mosquitoes and fruit flies. The first ancient crocodilians evolved, which sparked competition with the large amphibians that had since rule the freshwater world.

The Late Triassic spans from 237 million to 200 million years ago. Following the bloom of the Middle Triassic, the Late Triassic featured frequent heat spells, as well as moderate precipitation . The recent warming led to a boom of reptilian evolution on land as the first true dinosaurs evolve, as well as pterosaurs. All this climactic change, however, resulted in a large die-out known as the Triassic-Jurassic extinction event, in which all archosaurs, synapsids, and almost all large amphibians went extinct, as well as 34% of marine life in the fourth mass extinction event of the world. The cause is debatable.

Jurassic

The Jurassic ranges from 200 million years to 145 million years ago and features 3 major epochs: The Early Jurassic, the Middle Jurassic, and the Late Jurassic.

The Early Jurassic spans from 200 million years to 175 million years ago. The climate was much more humid than the Triassic, and as a result, the world was very tropical. In the oceans, Plesiosaurs, Ichthyosaurs and Ammonites fill waters as the dominant races of the seas. On land, dinosaurs and other reptiles stake their claim as the dominant race of the land, with species such as Dilophosaurus at the top. The first true crocodiles evolved, pushing out the large amphibians to near extinction. All-in-all, reptiles rise to rule the world. Meanwhile, the first true mammals evolve, but never exceed the height of a shrew.

The Middle Jurassic spans from 175 million to 163 million years ago. During this epoch, reptiles flourished as huge herds of sauropods, such as Brachiosaurus and Diplodocus, filled the fern prairies of the Middle Jurassic. Many other predators rose as well, such as Allosaurus. Conifer forests made up a large portion of the forests. In the oceans, Plesiosaurs were quite common, and Ichthyosaurs were flourishing. This epoch was the peak of the reptiles.

The Late Jurassic spans from 163 million to 145 million years ago. The increase in sea-levels opened up the Atlantic sea way which would continue to get larger over time. The divided world would give opportunity for the diversification of new dinosaurs.

Cretaceous

The Cretaceous is the longest era in the Mesozoic, but has only two periods: the Early Cretaceous, and the Late Cretaceous.

The Early Cretaceous spans from 145 million to 100 million years ago. The Early Cretaceous saw the expansion of seaways, and as a result, the decline and extinction of sauropods . Many coastal shallows were created, and that caused Ichthyosaurs to die out. Mosasaurs evolved to replace them as head of the seas. Some island-hopping dinosaurs, like Eustreptospondylus, evolved to cope with the coastal shallows and small islands of ancient Europe. Other dinosaurs rose up to fill the empty space that the Jurassic-Cretaceous extinction left behind, such as Carcharodontosaurus and Spinosaurus. Of the most successful would be the Iguanodon which spread to every continent. Seasons came back into effect an the poles got seasonally colder, but dinosaurs still inhabited this area like the Leaellynasaura which inhabited the polar forests year-round, and many dinosaurs migrated there during summer like Muttaburrasaurus. Since it was too cold for crocodiles, it was the last stronghold for large amphibians, like Koolasuchus. Pterosaurs got larger as species like Tapejara and Ornithocheirus evolved. More importantly, the first true birds evolved which sparked competition between them and the pterosaurs.

The Late Cretaceous spans from 100 million to 65 million years ago. The Late Cretaceous featured a cooling trend that would continue on in the Cenozoic period. Eventually, tropics were restricted to the equator and areas beyond the tropic lines featured extreme seasonal changes in weather. Dinosaurs still thrived as new species such as Tyrannosaurus, Ankylosaurus, Triceratops and Hadrosaurs dominated the food web. Pterosaurs, however, were going into a decline as birds took to the skies. The last pterosaur to die off was Quetzalcoatlus. Marsupials evolved within the large conifer forests as scavengers. In the oceans, Mosasaurs ruled the seas to fill the role of the Ichthyosaurs, and huge plesiosaurs, such as Elasmosaurus, evolved. Also, the first flowering plants evolved. At the end of the Cretaceous, the Deccan traps and other volcanic eruptions were poisoning the atmosphere. As this was continuing, it is thought that a large meteor smashed into earth, creating the Chicxulub Crater in an event known as the K-T Extinction, the fifth and most recent mass extinction event, in which 75% of life on earth went extinct, including all non-avian dinosaurs. Everything over 10 kilograms went extinct. The age of the dinosaurs was officially over.

Cenozoic Era

The Cenozoic features the rise of mammals on their conquest to rule the land, as the dinosaurs have now left a huge opening as top dog. There are three division of the Cenozoic: the Paleogene, the Neogene and Quaternary.

Paleogene

The Paleogene spans from the extinction of the dinosaurs, some 65 million years ago, to the dawn of the Neogene twenty three million years ago. It features three epochs: the Paleocene, Eocene and Oligocene.

The Paleocene ranged from 65 million to 55 million years ago. The Paleocene is a transitional point between the devastation that is the K-T extinction, to the rich jungles environment that is the Early Eocene. The Early Paleocene saw the recovery of the earth. The continents began to take their modern shape, but all continents were separated from each other. Afro-Eurasia is separated by the Tethys Sea, and the Americas are separated by the strait of Panama, as the isthmus has not yet formed. This epoch features a general warming trend, with jungles eventually reaching the poles. The oceans were dominated by sharks as the large reptiles that had once ruled went extinct. Archaic mammals filled the world such as creodonts and early primates that evolved during the Mesozoic, and as a result, there was nothing over 10 kilograms. Mammals are still quite small.

The Eocene Epoch ranged from 55 million years to 33 million years ago. In the Early-Eocene, life was small and living in cramped jungles, much like the Paleocene. There was nothing over the weight of 10 kilograms. Among them were early primates, whales and horses along with many other early forms of mammals. At the top of the food chains were huge birds, such as Gastornis. It is the only time in recorded history that birds ruled the world . The temperature was 30 degrees Celsius with little temperature gradient from pole to pole. In the Mid-Eocene, the circum-Antarctic current between Australia and Antarctica formed which disrupted ocean currents worldwide and as a result caused a global cooling effect, shrinking the jungles. This allowed mammals to grow to mammoth proportions, such as whales which are, by now, almost fully aquatic. Mammals like Andrewsarchus were now at the top of the food-chain and sharks were replaced by whales such as Basilosaurus as rulers of the seas. The Late-Eocene saw the rebirth of seasons, which caused the expansion of savanna-like areas, along with the evolution of grass.

The Oligocene Epoch spans from 33 million to 23 million years ago. The Oligocene feature the expansion of grass which had led to many new species to evolve, including the first elephants, cats, dogs, marsupials and many other species still prevalent today. Many other species of plants evolved in this period too, such as the evergreen trees. A cooling period was still in effect and seasonal rains were as well. Mammals still continued to grow larger and larger. Paraceratherium, the largest land mammal to ever live evolved during this period, along with many other perissodactyls in an event known as the Grand coupre.

Neogene

The Neogene spans from 23 million to 3 million years ago, and is the shortest geological period in the Phanerozoic Eon. It features 2 epochs: the Miocene, and the Pliocene.

The Miocene spans from 23 to 5 million years ago and is a period in which grass spreads further across, effectively dominating a large portion of the world, diminishing forests in the process. Kelp forests evolved, leading to new species such as sea otters to evolve. During this time, perissodactyls thrived, and evolved into many different varieties. Alongside them were the apes, which evolved into a staggering 30 species. Overall, arid and mountainous land dominated most of the world, as did grazers. The Tethys Sea finally closed with the creation of the Arabian Peninsula and in its wake left the Black, Red, Mediterranean and Caspian Seas. This only increased aridity. Many new plants evolved, and 95% of modern seed plants evolved in the mid-Miocene.

The Pliocene ranges from 5 to 2 million years ago. The Pliocene features dramatic climactic changes, which ultimately leads to modern species and plants. The most dramatic are the formation of Panama, and the accumulation of ice at the poles, leading to a massive die-off, India and Asia collide forming the Himalayas, the Rockies and Appalachian mountain ranges were formed, and the Mediterranean Sea dried up for the next several million years. Along with these major geological events, the Australopithecus evolves in Africa, beginning the human branch. Also, with the isthmus of Panama, animals migrate across North and South America, wreaking havoc on the local ecology. Climactic changes bring along savannas that are still continuing to spread across the world, Indian monsoons, deserts in East Asia, and the beginnings of the Sahara desert. The earth's continents and seas move into their present shapes, and the world map hasn't changed much since.

Quaternary

The Quaternary ranges from 3 million to present day, and features modern animals, and dramatic climate changes and features two epochs: the Pleistocene and the Holocene.

The Pleistocene lasted from 3 million to 12,000 years ago. This epoch features the ice ages which is a result from the cooling effect that started in the Mid-Eocene. As the ice progressively migrated towards the equator, the areas north and south of the tropic line featured intense winters yet mild summers. Meanwhile, Africa experienced terrible droughts which resulted in the creation of the Sahara, Namib, and Kalahari deserts. To cope, many animals evolved including Mammoths, Giant ground sloths, Dire wolves and most famously Homo sapiens. 100,000 years ago marked the end of one of the worst droughts of Africa, and the expansion of primitive man. As the Pleistocene draws to a close, one of the largest die-outs causes many mega-fauna to die off, including the last hominid species . All continents are effected, but Africa isn't hit quite as hard.

The Holocene ranges from 12,000 years ago to present day. Also known as "the Age of Man", the Holocene features the rise of man on his path to sentience. All recorded history and "the history of the world" lies within the boundaries of the Holocene epoch. Human activity, however, is being blamed for a die-out that has been going on since 10,000 B.C.E. commonly referred to as "the Sixth Extinction" with an estimated extinction rate of 140,000 species per year.

See also

Notes

References

Further reading

Kauffman, Stuart.

Legacy Books, Washington D. C., 2000, ISBN 0-476-00330-X

Walker, Martin G. Dog Ear Publishing, 2006.

Call Of Duty

Call of Duty is a first-person shooter video game franchise. The series began on Microsoft Windows, and later expanded to consoles and handhelds. Several spin-off games have been released. The earlier games in the series are set primarily in World War II, including Call of Duty, Call of Duty 2, and Call of Duty 3. Beginning with Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, which is set in modern times, the series has shifted focus away from World War II. Modern Warfare, released November 2007, was followed by World at War and Modern Warfare 2. Black Ops, released November 2010, takes place in the Cold War, while Modern Warfare 3, released November 2011, takes place in a near-future setting. Black Ops II, released November 2012, takes place mainly in the year 2025. Call of Duty: Ghosts was released in November 2013. In May 2014, Advanced Warfare was announced. On April 9, 2015, Treyarch announced Black Ops III.

The Call of Duty games are published and owned by Activision. While Infinity Ward is still a developer, Treyarch and Sledgehammer Games also develop several of the titles with the release of the studios' games alternating with each other. Some games have been developed by Gray Matter Interactive, Nokia, Exakt Entertainment, Spark Unlimited, Amaze Entertainment, n-Space, Aspyr, Rebellion Developments, Ideaworks Game Studio, and nStigate Games. The games use a variety of engines, including the id Tech 3, the Treyarch NGL, and the IW engine.

As of April 2015, the Call of Duty series has sold over 175 million copies. Sales of all Call of Duty games topped US$10 billion.

Other products in the franchise include a line of action figures designed by Plan-B Toys, a card game created by Upper Deck Company, Mega bloks sets by Mega Brands, and a comic book mini-series published by WildStorm Productions.

Main series

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at:11/16/2004 text:"Call of Duty: Finest Hour"

at:10/25/2005 text:"Call of Duty 2"

at:11/07/2006 text:"Call of Duty 3"

at:11/07/2007 text:"Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare"

at:11/11/2008 text:"Call of Duty: World at War"

at:11/10/2009 text:"Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2"

at:11/09/2010 text:"Call of Duty: Black Ops"

at:11/08/2011 text:"Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3"

at:11/13/2012 text:"Call of Duty: Black Ops II"

shift: at:11/13/2012 text:"Call of Duty: Black Ops: Declassified"

at:09/05/2013 text:"Call of Duty: Strike Team"

shift: at:11/05/2013 text:"Call of Duty: Ghosts"

at:11/03/2014 text:"Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare"

at:11/06/2015 text:"Call of Duty: Black Ops III"

World War II games

Call of Duty

Call of Duty is a video game based on the Quake III Arena engine, and was released on October 29, 2003. The game was developed by Infinity Ward and published by Activision. The game simulates the infantry and combined arms warfare of World War II. An expansion pack, Call of Duty: United Offensive, was developed by Gray Matter Interactive with contributions from Pi Studios and produced by Activision. The game follows American paratroopers, British paratroopers and the Red Army. The Mac OS X version of the game was ported by Aspyr Media. In late 2004, the N-Gage version was developed by Nokia and published by Activision. Other versions were released for PC, including Collector's Edition, Game of the Year Edition, and the Deluxe Edition . On September 22, 2006, Call of Duty: War Chest was released for PC, collecting Call of Duty, United Offensive, and Call of Duty 2. Since November 12, 2007, Call of Duty and its sequels have been available for purchase via Valve's content delivery platform Steam.

Call of Duty 2

Call of Duty 2 is a first-person shooter video game, the sequel to Call of Duty. It was developed by Infinity Ward and published by Activision. The game is set during World War II and is experienced through the perspectives of soldiers in the Red Army, British Army and United States Army. It was released on October 25, 2005 for Microsoft Windows, November 15, 2005 for the Xbox 360, and June 13, 2006 for Mac OS X. Other versions were made for mobile phones, Pocket PCs, and smartphones.

Call of Duty 3

Call of Duty 3 is a World War II first-person shooter and the third installment in the Call of Duty video game series. Released on November 7, 2006, the game was developed by Treyarch, and was the first major installment in the Call of Duty series not to be developed by Infinity Ward, it was also the first not to be released on the PC platform. It was released on the PlayStation 2, PlayStation 3, Wii, Xbox, and Xbox 360. Call of Duty 3 follows the American, Canadian, British, French Resistance, and Polish armies after D-Day in the Falaise Gap.

Modern Warfare story arc

Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare

Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare is the fourth installment of the main series, and was developed by Infinity Ward. It is the first game in the series not to be set during World War II, but set in the modern day. It is the first to receive a Mature rating from the ESRB, except for the Nintendo DS version, which was rated Teen. The game was released for Microsoft Windows, Nintendo DS, PlayStation 3, and Xbox 360 on November 7, 2007. Download and retail versions for Mac OS X were released by Aspyr in September 2008. As of May 2009, Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare has sold over 13 million copies.

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 is the sixth installment of the main series. It was developed by Infinity Ward and published by Activision. Activision Blizzard officially announced Modern Warfare 2 on February 11, 2009. The game was released worldwide on November 10, 2009, for the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and Microsoft Windows. Modern Warfare 2 is the direct sequel to Call of Duty 4 and continues the same storyline, taking place five years after the first game and featuring several returning characters including Captain Price and "Soap" MacTavish.

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 is a first-person shooter video game. It is the eighth installment of the Call of Duty series and the third installment of the Modern Warfare arc. Due to a legal dispute between the game's publisher Activision and the former co-executives of Infinity Ward – which caused several lay-offs and departures within the company – Sledgehammer Games assisted in the development of the game, while Raven Software was brought in to make cosmetic changes to the menus of the game. The game was said to have been in development since only two weeks after the release of their previous game, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. On May 12, 2011 on the official YouTube page for the Call of Duty franchise, four teasers were released entitled: America, England, France and Germany, indicating possible location for the game.

The game continues the story from the point at which it ended in the Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 and continues the fictional battle story between United States and Russia, which evolves into the Third World War between NATO allied nations and Ultra-nationalist Russia .

Black Ops story arc

Call of Duty: World at War

Call of Duty: World at War, developed by Treyarch, is the fifth installment of the main series and a prologue to Black Ops. It returns to the World War II setting of earlier titles. It is set in the Pacific theater and Eastern front of World War II. The game uses the same proprietary game engine as Call of Duty 4. Call of Duty: World at War was released for the PC, PS3, Wii, Xbox 360 consoles and the Nintendo DS handheld in North America on November 11, 2008, and November 14, 2008 in Europe. As of June 2009, Call of Duty: World at War has sold over 11 million copies.

Call of Duty: Black Ops

Call of Duty: Black Ops is a 2010 first-person shooter video game developed by Treyarch and published by Activision for release on November 9, 2010. It is the seventh installment of the Call of Duty series, the third game in the series to be developed by Treyarch, and the first game to take place during the Cold War, partially in the Vietnam War. It was initially available for Microsoft Windows, Xbox 360, and PlayStation 3; later it was also released for the Wii as well as the Nintendo DS.

Call of Duty: Black Ops II

Black Ops II was revealed on May 1, 2012. Black Ops II was the first game in the Call of Duty franchise to feature science fiction settings and weapons.

Call of Duty: Black Ops III

Call of Duty: Black Ops III is a first-person shooter video game, developed by Treyarch and published by Activision. The game was released November 6,2015.

Ghosts story arc

Call of Duty: Ghosts

Call of Duty: Ghosts is the tenth main installment in the series, and was developed at Infinity Ward. The game was released on November 5, 2013.

Advanced Warfare story arc

Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare

Advanced Warfare was released in November 2014.

Rotation

In 2006, Treyarch launched their first official Call of Duty game to the main series, Call of Duty 3 and is now a primary developing team for the series. Treyarch and Infinity Ward went by a contract to confirm that there will be a rotation every year of who produces the next upcoming title. In 2010, Sledgehammer Games announced they were working on a title to appear in the main series of Call of Duty. This game was postponed in order to help Infinity Ward produce Modern Warfare 3. In 2014, it was confirmed that Sledgehammer Games would produce the 2014 title, Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare. Instead of the two-year rotation between Infinity Ward and Treyarch, there is now a three-year rotation starting from Infinity Ward, Call of Duty: Ghosts, Sledgehammer Games, Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare, and Treyarch, Call of Duty: Black Ops III .

Other games

Console titles

Call of Duty: Finest Hour

Call of Duty: Finest Hour is the first console installment of Call of Duty, and was released on the GameCube, PlayStation 2, and Xbox. The PlayStation 2 and Xbox versions of the game include an online multiplayer mode which supports up to 32 players. It also includes new game modes.

Call of Duty 2: Big Red One

Call of Duty 2: Big Red One is a spin-off of Call of Duty 2 developed by Treyarch, and based on the American 1st Infantry Division's exploits during World War II. The game was released on GameCube, PlayStation 2, and Xbox.

Call of Duty: World at War – Final Fronts

Call of Duty: World at War – Final Fronts is the PlayStation 2 adaptation of Call of Duty: World at War. Developed by Rebellion Developments, Final Fronts features three campaigns involving the U.S. fighting in the Pacific theater and the Battle of the Bulge in Europe, as well as the British advancing on the Rhine River into Germany.

Call of Duty: The War Collection

Call of Duty: The War Collection is a boxed set compilation of Call of Duty 2, Call of Duty 3 and Call of Duty: World at War. It was released on the Xbox 360.

Handheld titles

Call of Duty: Roads to Victory

Call of Duty: Roads to Victory is a PSP game that was based on Call of Duty 3.

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare: Mobilized

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare: Mobilized is the Nintendo DS companion game for Modern Warfare 2. Developed by n-Space, the game takes place in the same setting as the main console game, but follows a different storyline and cast of characters. Playing as the S.A.S. and the Marines in campaign mode, both forces are trying to find a nuclear bomb.

Call of Duty: Black Ops DS

Call of Duty: Black Ops is the Nintendo DS companion game for Black Ops. Developed by n-Space, the game takes place in the same setting as the main console game, but follows a different storyline and cast of characters.

Call of Duty: Zombies and Zombies 2

Call of Duty: Zombies is a first-person shooter video game developed by Ideaworks Game Studio, and published by Activision for iOS. It is a spin-off of the Call of Duty series, and based on the "Nazi Zombies" mode of Call of Duty: World at War. A sequel for the iPhone and iPod Touch includes Shi No Numa that was originally released on the Xbox 360, PS3, and PC.

Call of Duty: Black Ops: Declassified

Call of Duty: Black Ops: Declassified is a PlayStation Vita Call of Duty game.

Call of Duty: Strike Team

Call of Duty: Strike Team is a first- and third-person shooter game developed by The Blast Furnace, and published by Activision for iOS. The game is set in 2020 with players tasked with leading a US Joint Special Operations Team after the country "finds themselves in a war with an unknown enemy". The game was released on September 5, 2013.

Call of Duty Online

Call of Duty Online was announced by Activision when the company first stated their interest in an Massively multiplayer online game in early 2011. By then, it had been in development for two years. Call of Duty Online is free-to-play, for mainland China. It is hosted by Tencent. Since Activision had lost the publishing rights to Call of Duty and several other franchises in China due to a legal dispute on most of the Western gaming consoles, it had been rumored that it would be Microsoft Windows-exclusive, since PCs hold the dominant share of gamers in mainland China.

Canceled titles

Call of Duty: Combined Forces

Call of Duty: Combined Forces was a proposed concept draft which was originally intended to be a sequel or Expansion Pack to Call of Duty: Finest Hour. However, due to multiple legal issues that arose between Spark Unlimited, Electronic Arts, and Activision as well as other production problems, the games draft and scripts never came to be. The game was projected to cost $10.5 million to produce after Finest Hour was complete. Eventually Activision deemed the ideas as more of an expansion than something entirely new, causing Activision to reject the proposal and ending their contract with Spark Unlimited shortly after.

Call of Duty: Devil's Brigade

Call of Duty: Devil's Brigade was a canceled first-person shooter for the Xbox 360 developed by Underground Entertainment. The game was set in World War II, mainly focusing on the Italian Campaign.

Call of Duty: Vietnam

Call of Duty: Vietnam was a third-person shooter set during the Vietnam War. It was in development for at least six to eight months at Sledgehammer Games. The development was stopped because Infinity Ward needed help finishing Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 due to the employee firings and departures in 2010.

Other media

Modern Warfare 2: Ghost

Modern Warfare 2: Ghost is a six-part comic book mini-series, based upon Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. The storyline focuses on the backstory of the character Ghost. The series is published by WildStorm and the first issue was released on November 10, 2009, alongside the game.

Merchandise

The Call of Duty Real-Time Card Game was announced by card manufacturer Upper Deck.

In 2004, Activision, in cooperation with the companies Plan-B Toys and Radioactive Clown, released the "Call of Duty: Series 1" line of action figures, which included three American soldiers and three German soldiers from the World War II era. While the American G.I. action figure was made in 2004, Plan-B Toys later discontinued a controversial Nazi SS Guard action figure based on the Nazi Totenkopf officer seen in ''Call of Duty'.

In 2008, McFarlane Toys announced their partnership with Activision to produce action figures for the ''Call of Duty' series. McFarlane Toys' first series of action figures were released in October 2008 and consists of four different figures: Marine with Flamethrower, Marine Infantry, British Special Ops, and Marine with Machine Gun.

Short films

Find Makarov is a fan-made film. The video was well received Call of Duty publishers, Activision, who contacted We Can Pretend and subsequently produced a second short film, Operation Kingfish.

Find Makarov: Operation Kingfish is a fan-made prequel to Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 and was first shown at Call of Duty XP. The video was produced by We Can Pretend, with visual effects by The Junction, and was endorsed by Activision. The video tells the story of how Captain Price ended up in a Russian Gulag set before the events of Modern Warfare 2.

Films

On November 6, 2015, The Hollywood Reporter has reported that Activision Blizzard has launch a production studio called Activision Blizzard Studios and planning a live action Call of Duty cinematic universe in 2018 or 2019.

Call of Duty in competitive gaming

The Call of Duty games were used in Esports, starting in 2006, alongside the game released at the time, Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare. Over the years, the series has extended with releases such as Call of Duty: World at War, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, Call of Duty: Black Ops, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, Call of Duty: Black Ops II, and Call of Duty: Ghosts. Games are played in leagues like Major League Gaming.

Players can compete in ladders or tournaments. The ladders are divided into several sub ladders such as: the singles ladder, doubles ladder, team ladder and hardcore team ladder . The difference between the regular team ladder and the hardcore team ladder is the in game settings and thus a rule differentiation. Winning ladder matches on a competitive website rewards the user with experience points which add up to give them an overall rank.

The tournaments offered on these websites provide players with the opportunity to win cash prizes and trophies if successful winning their given match. The trophies are registered and saved on the players profile if/when they win a tournament and the prize money is delivered to the bank account number listed on the account. Call of Duty: Ghosts is the most active game being played competitively in 2014, with an average of 15,000 teams participating every season.

For the past 6 seasons in competitive Call of Duty, Full Sail University has hosted a prize giveaway to the top team, $2,500 in prize per season to the team in first place. The other ladders give out credits and medals registered on their profiles. Tournaments hosted on the Call of Duty: Ghostss Arena give cost from 15 to 30 credits, thusly averaging at a cost of about $18.75 per tournament. If the player competes with a team, the prize money is divided and an equal cut is given to each player. Other tournaments are hosted in specific cities and countries for LAN teams to compete in, with substantial prizes.

The biggest Call of Duty tournament hosted was Call of Duty: Experience 2011, a tournament that began when Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 released and was hosted in 2011.

Gaming Call of Duty competitively is most popular in Europe and North America, with users who participate in tournaments and ladder matches daily. Competitive players have an average of 500,000 followers on social media.

Call of Duty Endowment

The Call of Duty Endowment is a non-profit foundation created by Activision Blizzard to help find employment for U.S. military veterans. The first donation, consisting of $125,000, was presented to the Paralyzed Veterans of America.

Co-chairman General James Jones is a former U.S. National Security Advisor. Founder Robert Kotick is the CEO of Activision Blizzard. Upon its founding in 2009, the organization announced a commitment to create thousands of career opportunities for veterans, including those returning from the Middle East. Annual awards given by the endowment include the "Seal of Distinction," a $30,000 initial grant given to selected veteran's service organizations. In November 2014, the endowment launched the "Race to 1,000 Jobs" campaign to encourage gamers to donate money to and get involved in organizations that provide veterans with services. As of 2015, the Call of Duty Endowment had provided around $12 million in grants to veterans' organizations in the United States, which had helped place 14,700 veterans in jobs.

On March 30, 2010, CODE presented 3,000 copies of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, approximately $180,000 in value, to the U.S. Navy. The copies were delivered to over 300 ships and submarines as well as Navy Morale, Welfare and Recreation facilities worldwide.

References

External links


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